On Search for Tailoring Functions: Empirical Findings and Design Concepts

The design of the user interface plays a major role in encouraging users to tailor an application. In this paper, we focus on a particular design issue. It is the question how to support users in finding those functions, which allow tailoring an application. An empirical investigation shows that this is a major problem when trying to tailor generic applications. To tackle this problem we develop the concept of direct activation, which eases finding a tailoring function when another function needs modification.