Beyond de-facto standards for designing human-computer interactions in configurators

A web configurator is an application that allows its users to tailor a customizable product to their own needs by specifying their requirements through a graphical user interface. Configurators have been successfully applied to tangible products (e.g., cars, mobile phones) as well as intangible products like software (e.g., operating systems, ERPs) and services (e.g., insurance). A configurator user faces multiple decisions until she has addressed all the characteristics to be retained in the final product. In order to enable users to make the right decisions, with as low effort as possible, HCIs in configurators must be thoughtfully designed. Researchers have previously identified guidelines for HCI design by conducting empirical studies of existing configurators. In this vision paper we propose to draw HCI guidelines through a different approach, which consists in framing theories from the HCI community into the context of configuration models.