Why, when and how do users customize Web portals?

More and more content providers offer Web portals that their users can customize. However, little research has been done to understand whether and how people customize portal content. In this paper, we discuss a method for designing a usability scorecard for customizable Web content design. We believe this approach is more advantageous than simply producing a list of heuristics for portal design due to the evolving nature of a Web portal's final implementation on a user's desktop. The practical outcomes of this line of research are improvements to portal design, preparing for the day the desktop itself becomes a Web portal.