Cameron Adam’s presentation and talk on web-based interfaces was certainly one of the highlights of this conference. I attended his session last year and was very impressed with the ease with which he came up with new ideas and coded them without any further ado. He did not disappoint me this year. To find more about him, read his blog “The Man in Blue“.
Cameron said that it was not really a new idea any more to customise content for your users (which doesn’t mean it’s a bad one, it’s just not cutting edge any more): Amazon is probably the most prominent user of that principle. However, as he pointed out, the future was in the LAYOUTS to be customised for or by your user (I will come to the difference in a minute). This is not a revelation that might sweep people away, but Cameron’s observations and advice was very helpful.
He portrayed the interface design of a web site as one particular point, on a vast spectrum of user preferences. As layouts are mostly static, it is not possible to cater for the needs and wants of everyone, you can only try to place your particular design on the spectrum so that it caters for (hopefully) a majority of users. With dynamic interfaces, you can in fact cover a whole RANGE on that spectrum, which would obviously cater for more users.
Of course, this is not useful for all web sites: in fact, he showed that the usefulness of customisation on a site increased with the frequency of use. Also, they were more useful for sites that offered a service (web applications) than for web sites that invite to browse.
Customisation by the user
His initial example was MySpace, but he immediately pointed out that the customisation was too hard for 99% of the users, and therefore mostly turned pretty ugly. He also pointed out that besides all that customisation, it would be useful if sites could retain some basic branding (like Facebook). Flickr started to offer some sort of choice in terms of customisation, but only on a very small scale. However, even that choice is already enough for the web admins to analyse user patterns (which I think in itself is already hugely useful). A web site that offers much more than that is NetVibes: its purpose is to bring together feeds and let the users re-arrange them, just like iGoogle (only more concentrated on social networking apps). Even the biggest search providers now offer similar features: Google offers searchmash, and Yahoo! offers alpha. Have a look and play around with it a little 
An observation he made is a standard model for interface design: there is a gap between the way content is offered on a web site, and the mental model that users have when they approach it. It is of course the aim of every designer to make this gap as small as possible, and customisation can certainly help a great deal there.
Customisation by analysis
In this second approach, the web site gathers data from the users to change the interface for users, without them actively doing anything but interacting with the content. A rather obvious example for this would be a web site that resets the interface if users visit it with different screen resolutions, something that is fairly easy to do, and that could create neat effects. Please be aware that I am not talking about liquid layouts here, Cameron actually presented a Javascript solution for this problem. Cameron pointed out the advantages of CSS3 for this, have a look at his example.
A more powerful example is the BBC web site that (at least in parts of it) makes the background of blocks of information more salient if users have used it often in the past. Thus, by simply looking at something repeatedly, it will stand out (very neat, I find).
Cameron’s conclusion
Cameron calls this “the cream on top” - he suggests that you get the basics of the web site working first, your content right, and so on, and THEN you should think about something like this. He also says that the actual design process will be much tougher if you make it customisable for users, as you have to cater for many more scenarios. And his final piece of advice was to look up the Google Web Toolkit to make programming easier.
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