The first picture is a sketch of a sort of drag and drop idea with the customization. You would choose how many boxes you want, and then you would choose where you wanted to place them on your main page. Ads are placed on the side, though I suppose they could be moved around to either the top, the other side, or the bottom. Inside each box you would put down whatever you wanted in there. It’s not limited to music or movies, but podcasts and other applications can be placed in there too.
The second picture is a bit more predefined, but, I was thinking of instead of what I have down, make it so that you generate a box that’s placed automatically, and you can change the properties in each box to put in what you want to see. Similar to the first one, yet since everything is predetermined, we wouldn’t have to worry about issues pertaining to where people put the boxes.
I haven’t added anything about search bars or links or anything because this was supposed to be only the options page to customize your own start page.
Human-Computer Interaction @ IU 
November 10, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I think this is a good idea because it can give the user lot of freedom to control the layout of the page. However, do you think it will overwhelm the users if they are given so many decisions to make? I suppose having a default content at first but still allow users to manipulate contents later like in your sketches will be a good idea.
November 10, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I think the choice to have as many boxes as you want is a good idea that addresses the issue that our interviewees were having with the page being too cluttered. This way users could choose what they want to see and not be overwhelmed with options every time they open the store. We would need to be careful, however, and make sure if a user chooses not to have a box on their homepage, that the functionality of that box doesn’t simply disappear and still could be easily accessed.
November 17, 2008 at 8:15 pm
First of all, I appreciate your effort in coming up with more than one sketch. This is a really important thing for a designer.
Secondly, I like both your sketches. They give the user enough control at the same time does not dilute the core of the application. And good call about keeping the “Search” link untouched.
Good job overall!