Representing Repairs in Configuration Interfaces: A Look at Industrial Practices

Configurators are widespread applications where users can tailor products (i.e. goods or services) to their needs by selecting options and setting parameter values. Constraints over these options exist to avoid building invalid products. Thus, when the user attempts to combine incompatible options, the configurator should raise an error and help the user repair her configuration, that is, change the selected options to obtain a valid product. In this paper, we observe how 54 configurators from different industries handle this repair mechanism. We show that in a majority of cases, the configuration interfaces exhibit bad practices that impede an effective usage of repair, thereby impoverishing user experience.