Boosting Take Up means Ensuring Access for All
Customisation / adjustability
The ability to customise data output lies at the core of what most people call accessibility which they generally relate to some kind of disability. This is helpful to a degree because it allows us to measure the functional gap between a system's supposed potential and what human beings can get out of it. I say "functional gap" deliberately because I do not assume, as many public sector officials do, that the failure of ICT uptake is solely a human failure; if only, the argument goes, these people would nail themselves to chairs and learn some word processing, all would be well. Much of the failure is in design and the core of that failure is a lack of granularity in data creation which allows for unlimited customisation. This does not simply mean making the print larger or smaller, it also means running voice output simultaneous with print as the prime example of the simple rule: multimedia must be multimodal. Remember that you can analyse the 50% not on line according to a functional gap between themselves and a system as well as according to the socio-economic framework and the bedrock of the functionality gap is an illiteracy rate of 20-25% of the whole population, with 20% of children in "Special Measures".
I will come on in a minute to the key special case of the customisation of lexicographic range but, for the time being, I want to go back to something I said right at the beginning, about our cultural disagreement about the purpose of ICT and to illustrate it with a story.
Not long ago a major Department of Government decided it was going to make PC-based services much easier to access and it hired a major company to look at what was wrong with present systems. Well, just incidentally, it reported that the majority of its sample found the idea that you press the "start" button to close something down just a tad outlandish! But the headline from an eminent engineer who had believed all his life in user centred design was that he had undergone a Damascene conversion; he had found that people wanted simple interfaces and wanted to do one thing at a time and that, crucially, the occlusion mechanism we use on as page of more than 100 elements is acquired, not natural. The articulation of the (7 + or - 2) rule, as it is called, holds for people until they learn how to choose in more complex situations and how to occlude. Another titbit from this same Government project was that when I asked for the (7 + or - 2) rule to be used on the project web site - and remember, the object of the project was to make the internet more accessible - I was told that a home page with only nine or fewer elements would break the house style.
The other aspect of this topic of customisation is the ability to move from configuration where a new user specified certain requirements, to systems which adjust to the behaviour of users. This can be simple, as in the case when a transport timetable presents data on the basis of the user's post code, or more complex where the system develops general rules based on user preference. This latter kind of system is becoming ever more sophisticated as the semantic web develops and it is vital for reluctant internet users.