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

[Lisa Battle]

The ability to change the font size and increase the
foreground/background contrast is also an
accessibility feature. It makes the application more
usable for people with less than perfect vision. If
you sell to the government (and it looks like you do),
this could be a good ROI argument.

Lisa Battle


--- "Wilson, Russell" <Russell.Wilson at netqos.com>
wrote:

> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only
> relevant quoted material.]
> 
> 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
> 
>
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