High Fidelity ?= High User Experience

[OK, so I was going to publish this like 4 months ago, actually before new years, I mean really long time ago. So what happened in he mean time? I moved back to Seattle from my 3-month vacation after graduation; nice!]

Lately I've been looking into the Software as a Service (SaaS) demos Microsoft published. Especially the Litware project, and its architecture explained here and with more details here. It's a great guidance tool that demonstrates how an SaaS application should be.

One of their core take on designing an SaaS application was to define how configurable your application will be. How much of the application's features am I allowing the users to tweak? If I have a dumb, simple application then it will be easier to deploy and maintain it. If I let every single option to be managed by users then they can configure the application to look and behave exactly how they like.

In their presentation they have this nice rainbow spectrum with "One size fits all" on one end and "Fully configurable" on the other. My two cents on this? I totally agree with the rainbow but High Fidelity & High User Experience? OK, I guess UX is not only GUI interaction experience but can also mean to configure the software to such detail to fit my needs perfectly. But then I thought that meant High Fidelity. It's actually a great feature that I can put my company's logo in Basecamp. But then again this example lies on the side of configurability (I don't think this word even exists, my Google Docs spell checker is complaining). Whatever, I'm not here to dis the great work Litware guys have put forth.

Then there is the other question; Does a "Fully Configurable" application give you the best User Experience? My head explodes every time I think about MySpace. I know it's been a hit by millions of users but come on. The only reason I prefer Facebook is the fact that Facebook looks so much elegant the way it is and it would take me days to create a MySpace page that I will like myself. With Facebook, the page is already setup for you, you don't have any options to change your font color or the background image. It's perfect, I'd rather spend time reading my friends' walls and look at their picture.

But then again we're talking about SaaS, it's enterprisey and you need to be scared of those kinds of software. The idea is that my SharePoint page's background should be in sync with my company's logo and I should be able to receive any kind of notifications when the "Company Roster.doc" is updated, right?