[IxDA Discuss] Thoughts on skinning/customizing enterprise apps?

[Wilson, Russell]

This is the direction we were considering, but
I have to ask "is it worth it?"  Is the extra
work to provide this capability (the cost) less than
the ultimate benefit perceived by the user?  Will you
get a reasonable ROI for doing this?  If you have 1000
users and only 2 care or take advantage of it...

(aside from the good points about the internal development
and maintenance benefits resulting from developing a 
skinnable architecture)



---------------------------------------------------
Hi all,  

Just as a quick side note on this -- we recently worked on a large
application UI project where the preliminary specs called for
user-configurable display elements like window skins, text size,
fonts...which became a problem, when I saw that end users were doing
things like red-on-fuschia 20pt Comic Sans MS on an 1280 x 1024 LCD
monitor running at 800 x 600.  (extreme example, but stuff like that was
happening)

So we defined a very limited subset of customizable/skinnable
attributes.
Tahoma is OK, Verdana isn't.  A limited bumping up on the font size is
OK as long as you have your monitor set at the optimal resolution and
the window can scale.  No custom cursors.  We documented this with
rationales on consistency and usability.

So maybe not fully skin-able interfaces unless it's an MP3 player or
something, but otherwise let people have fun personalizing the UI
through treatments that don't adversely affect usability?

Eric