Anchored Customization: Anchoring Settings to the Application Interface to Afford Customization

Abstract

The settings panel is the standard customization mechanism used in software applications today, yet it has undergone minimal design improvement since its introduction in the 1980s. Entirely disconnected from the application UI, these panels require users to rely on often-cryptic text labels to identify the settings they want to change. We propose the Anchored Customization approach, which anchors settings to conceptually related elements of the application UI. Our Customization Layer prototype instantiates this approach: users can see which UI elements are customizable, and access their associated settings. We designed three variants of Customization Layer based on multi-layered interfaces, and implemented these variants on top of a popular web application for task management, Wunderlist. Two experiments (Mechanical Turk and face-to-face) with a total of 60 participants showed that the two minimalist variants were 35% faster than Wunderlist's settings panel. Our approach provides significant benefits for users while requiring little extra work from designers and developers of applications.