Personal program settings

I want to share a wonderful quote from the book “Interface” by Jeff Raskin.

“Personal settings seem convenient, democratic, expandable, full of freedom and joy for the user, but, nevertheless, I am not familiar with any research that would talk about improving productivity, as well as objective improvement of usability and ease of learning the system .

Adding custom settings features certainly complicates the system and makes it more difficult to learn. I can assume that if you conduct a survey of users, then most of them will be delighted with the large number of parameters configured by the user.

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It is also important to note that users customize interfaces according to their subjective perceptions. The observations made in many experiments show that an interface that optimizes productivity is not necessarily an interface that optimizes subjective evaluations. ”

The italicized phrase is perfectly confirmed by practice. Here are some comments from users of the site linux.org.ru

“How can one call it thoughtful at all - an oak interface nailed to the floor with nails in which practically nothing can be customized !?”

“My opinion: just the user needs to be given the opportunity to change the layout of the interface elements (panels, buttons, etc.) as much as possible, as well as their appearance ... so that at the user, not programmatic level, you can completely shovel applications ... And then you stupidly let the design team go and they make the interface without tormenting the programmers with their corrals))) "

“An ideal desktop is one that can be customized as the user wants, rather than pushing it into the“ framework "and accustoming it to using the“ standard "”