Does Personalisation and Customisation make support and training more difficult?

“Click the Start button at the bottom left of the screen.” “There is no Start button.” “It will be on the taskbar, at the bottom.” “My taskbar is on the left. And I have hidden it.”

Anyone who has worked on a service desk has had that call. The user has customised their application or their desktop: moved the taskbar, rearranged the menus, hidden the toolbar, dragged screen elements to where they like them. It makes sense to them. But the support person is now trying to guide someone through a screen they cannot see, using instructions written for a different layout.

Personalisation and customisation help the user and can make life harder for everyone who has to support or train them. This article looks at why, whether it is still as much of a problem as it used to be, and what we can do about it without taking away the choices that make people productive.

In my past history, I found that Windows Vista was the start of the most customisation – my team suffered terribly with trying to understand a user’s customised screen when they were trying to provide telephone support. Interestingly, we found that often the person who performed the most customisation was also the type of person to get the most lost and need the most help – compounding the issue.

What people change, and why

It helps to separate two things. Personalisation is mostly cosmetic: a wallpaper, a colour theme, a dark mode. Customisation changes how the software works or where things are, and that is what troubles the support desk. Common examples are:

• Moving, resizing or auto-hiding the Windows taskbar, and rearranging the Start menu and icons.
• Adding, removing or hiding items in menus, toolbars and ribbons.
• Rearranging panels, columns, dashboards and saved views in business applications.
• Changing display scaling, zoom, language or regional settings, so the screen looks different from everyone else’s.
• Keyboard shortcuts, macros and browser extensions that change what the application does.

People do this for good reasons. It saves time on the tasks they do all day. It reflects habits built on an earlier version. It reduces clutter. And for many people it is an accessibility need: large text, high contrast, a screen reader or a layout that suits a physical limitation. That last group is not a support problem to be solved. The support process has to adapt to them.

It is also worth keeping the scale in perspective. In a classic 1991 study of 51 users over four months, Wendy Mackay found that most people do not customise every option they could. Plenty of people never change the defaults. So the problem is rarely everyone. It is the minority who have changed a lot, and they are the ones who generate the memorable calls.

Why it makes support and training harder

Support and training both rely on a shared picture: we are looking at the same screen, so “top left” and “the third icon along” mean the same thing. Customisation breaks that picture.

Where it bites	What goes wrong
Phone support	Directions depend on the default layout, so buttons are hidden, moved or renamed, and every step becomes a negotiation.
Written guides and videos	Screenshots show the default layout, so the user cannot match them to their own screen.
Vendor help websites	The feature may have been moved, renamed or hidden in the version the user is running, or in a newer one.
Classroom and onboarding training	Trainees on customised machines or hot desks cannot follow along, and the trainer cannot help them.
Knowledge sharing	The customiser’s tricks live in one head, and colleagues cannot use or support them.

The vendor side of this is easy to overlook. Software changes under the user constantly, especially cloud applications that update continuously, so even an unmodified screen may not match last month’s help page. And sometimes the vendor removes a customisation option altogether. When Windows 11 launched in 2021, Microsoft removed the ability to move the taskbar to the top or sides of the screen, so people turned to third-party tools to get it back. In 2026 Microsoft restored it, according to Windows Latest, with a setting for left, top, right or bottom. Imagine the support call: the right answer for “can I move my taskbar?” has changed twice in five years, depending on the date, the version and whether the user has installed an extra tool. Every one of those combinations is a different screen.

The cost is real if unglamorous: longer calls, more escalations, “could not reproduce” outcomes and frustrated users who feel they are being blamed for changing something they were allowed to change.

Is it as much of a problem now?

There was a time when people needed training to use a computer at all, and a customised screen could stop a novice completely. Today, most people have grown up with technology. So is this still as big a problem?

The case that it matters less:

• Digital ability is rising. The 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index found the national digital ability score up 8.7 points since 2023, to 73.6.
• People teach themselves. In the Australian Youth Digital Index, 74% of young people said their digital skills were self-taught.
• Help is closer. Users search, watch a video or ask an AI assistant, and the national inclusion index found that 46% of Australians had recently used generative AI. Search boxes inside software also reduce the need to know where anything lives.
• Screen sharing makes it easier to see what the user sees.

The case that it still matters, or matters differently:

• Skills vary a lot. In the 2025 inclusion index, South Australia scored below the national average on access, affordability and digital ability, and about one in five Australians remain digitally excluded.
• Being fluent on a phone is not the same as being fluent on a work PC. Educators report that younger students struggle with folders and file systems, and a Salesforce survey reported in Fortune found many young workers do not feel equipped for the digital skills their jobs need. “Digital native” can be an assumption that stops people asking for help.
• Software changes faster than anyone can learn it. Continuous cloud updates mean the problem is no longer “how do I use this?” but “what has changed since last week?”
• Confidence cuts both ways. The more comfortable people are with technology, the more they tend to customise, and the more unusual their setup becomes.
• There are more platforms and devices than ever, plus staff working remotely, beyond the reach of walk-up support.

My suspicion is that the problem has moved, not disappeared. It used to be “I do not know how to use it”. Now it is more often “it is not where you said it would be”.

So here is my question for you. Are your users more tech-savvy than they used to be, and is customisation as much of a problem now as it was when people needed training to use a computer? What do you see on the support desk? I would like to hear.

What helps

The answer is not to ban personalisation. People who feel in control of their tools work better, and some need those changes to work at all. The aim is to make support and training resilient to it.

For the support desk

• Ask what the user sees before you tell them where to click. “Read me the words along the top of the window” works better than “top left”.
• Guide by name and by search. “Type ‘display settings’ into the search box” survives a moved taskbar.
• Use screen sharing where you can, or ask for a screenshot.
• Record any non-default settings in the ticket.
• Before suggesting “reset to default”, ask whether the change is there for accessibility, and save the settings first.

For training

• Teach concepts and how to find things, not just click paths. People who know the name of a feature and how to search for it can recover from a rearranged screen.
• Show trainees where help is, and tell them the screen may differ from the demo.
• Test your guides on a default setup and on a heavily customised one.

For IT

• Set a standard baseline, allow personalisation within guardrails, and make settings easy to back up and restore.
• Lock things down only where it is needed, such as kiosks and shared machines. If the controls are too tight, people look for ways around them, as I discussed in Poor process, also not followed.
• Treat support articles like policies. The principles in Creating good policies and procedures apply: easy to find, simple to read, relevant and regularly reviewed. Put the software version and a review date on each article, and review after major updates.

For vendors and anyone designing internal applications

• Keep the core navigation stable, label icons with words, and make every customisation reversible with a visible reset.
• Give notice before you move or remove a feature, and keep old help pages clearly dated.

A good rule of thumb: support should be able to get a customised user back to a known place in under a minute, without anyone feeling blamed.