Customizable user interfaces: Does giving individuals the ability to customize information organization improve decision making?

摘要

Recent technological innovations permit individuals to customize the way information they view is organized by incorporating personal themes, personal menu structures, personal reports, and custom dashboards. Relying on the theory of cognitive fit, I investigate the effects of customization on decision making. Through use of an online experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, I test the hypothesis that decision accuracy will increase for participants who use custom displays. However, I do not find support for the hypothesis using either the originally proposed measure of decision accuracy or two additional measures of decision accuracy. Furthermore, supplemental analysis finds no significant relations between customization and two other measures of decision quality. Analysis suggests the participants possess sufficient self-insight to reliably perform the task and provides initial statistical confirmation that people organize information on a list from top to bottom based on the relative importance of the information to the decision maker.