On Studying Bad Practices in Configuration UIs

In today’s businesses, configurators are essential tools that allow customers to personalise a product to their specific needs. Being often the first contact between the retailer and the customer, it is important for a configurator to provide a smooth user experience. However, these software have been studied mostly from the reasoning point of view, that is, how to represent the logical relations between the configuration options and how to automatically ensure that the user makes no configuration error. In this paper, we focus instead on HCI and analyse the occurrence of 11 design flaws that occur in 28 car configurators. These flaws includes violations of general HCI principles as well as lacks of essential, configurator-specific functionalities. Our results indicate that most of the studied configurators contain defects in their UIs including, surprisingly, violations of some basic principles of HCIs. Still, the most frequent problems are inappropriate implementations of configurator-specific functionalities.