The Use of Strategies for Solving Tailoring Tasks

Features that allow end users to make changes, adapt or tailor their software applications have become increasingly common in the last decade. Especially developers of generic, mass produced applications seem to cram in tailoring features to make the systems flexible enough for a wide variety of users. In this thesis, the use of these tailoring features is studied in detail in an experiment including eight end users. The results of the experiment are discussed to show what aspects of the tailoring features are constraining or facilitating to the different end users, and tell us that not all features are accessible to all end users, because they vary in complexity and difficulty. The process of tailoring is described using concepts from the field of educational research.