Something caught me in my feed reader today that I felt I had to share. Tammie Lister (”Diary of a Website](http://www.diaryofawebsite.com/) wrote today about the benefits of allowing your users more flexibility in changing their online environment. She writes unequivocally:

“Thinking of your users less like dumb test cases and more like real people with real wants and giving them the ability and respect to make their own decisions, has been proven time and time again to benefit sites.” “Putting users in the driving seat](http://www.diaryofawebsite.com/blog/2007/07/putting-users-in-the-driving-seat/

First, I absolutely respect Tammie and she’s always had some really valuable ideas, and in fact she makes some good points in her post, particularly with regard to social networking applications, but on the general subject of user control, there are a few ways I disagree with the concept.

Don’t intimidate your audience

In general the idea that users love to have control over their environment makes sense. On the surface it would seem to benefit everyone if users had more freedom to change the look and feel of a website at their whim, but in fact it can be poor design to hand over the reigns too often and too soon.

A quote which came to mind immediately this morning was from Norman Potter’s ??What is a Designer?? in which he discusses the design of furniture. Although he’s talking about a chair that is made to be flexible in its design, a lot of Potter’s insights can quickly be taken to web design, and in this case he makes sense when he says:

“…in practice, the most ‘flexible’ solutions, theoretically at the free disposal of the user, can come to feel either denuded of life, or psychologically tyrannous (or both); while an apparently rigid and very definite organization of a space can bestow freedom.” p.51

(pq)A truly competent designer will know and be able to address the needs and desires of the user such that he has no need to change his environment.

While to some degree, small changes to layout or font sizes do in fact benefit many users and can be given for the sake of general usability, I don’t believe users should be given actual design decisions simply for the sake of user control. In this way, there is no guaranteed benefit to the user; rather it is merely a gift to stroke his ego and make him feel a part of something which in most cases he has no need to be a part of.

Potter continues his point to say that when a user is given too much control or too many choices over design “there is a continuous subliminal suggestion that [he] might be missing out on some better permutation of the parts.” In other words, a user is now faced with a decision he may not be psychologically ready to handle and may feel overwhelmed in suddenly being able to change things that probably should have remained as is. And, the user can feel intimidated, thinking the default isn’t good enough, that he must change something, though he may have no clear idea of what or how. Here, your user is momentarily removed from the site’s content — and the purpose of the site, unless it was strictly to offer design recreation, has been lost.

Usability is different from user control over design

What about usability, you may ask. There is such a thing as User Centered Design (UCD); in fact there are whole websites and organizations dedicated to it. The “Society for Technical Communication](http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/articles/ucd%20_web_devel.html describes UCD as “a philosophy that places the person (as opposed to the ‘thing’) at the center; it is a process that focuses on cognitive factors (such as perception, memory, learning, problem-solving, etc.) as they come into play during peoples’ interactions with things.” There’s clearly nothing wrong with designing for the user, to make them comfortable, to guide their path through a site. But, there is a line where the user can been given too much control over too many pieces of the site which are unnecessary and it is this line where the designer will lose the user.

Sometimes (more advanced) users will want control

It is possible, ideal even, to consider the needs of the user before ever reaching the point of handing design decisions to them. An exception might be with a site which caters to a largely design community, such as “Twitter](http://twitter.com or the new kid on the block, “Pownce](http://pownce.com. In this case, I’d say that Pownce could do more than offer four templates to switch from and could instead follow Twitter in offering background and color changes. For a design community, and**for a place where the user’s experience involves a personal page that is their own individual space_*, it makes sense to give the user design control.

Still, it is not always the best decision to start making movable elements on a page or customizable color schemes for the sake of user control. And here I’m talking about primarily style related decisions, as opposed to specifically interactive user elements as Tammie talks about in her post. She’s right on when she suggests addressing users by name and giving them some control over layout and color when working with personal pages (she gives the example of “Facebook](http://facebook.com/).

Maybe she meant to say that it is these personal user pages like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. which should be given more control. In general, websites should be designed by the designer and left with only minor usability related changes available, changes which should always remain the control of the user from the beginning, as opposed to style or functionally related changes which should be left to those with the appropriate training and expertise on style an function.