The service need not look and behave the same for everybody. Many aspects of it can be tuned or modified:
You can pick one of many piece sets to change the board look,
You can fine-tune many settings using personal preferences,
You can fine-tune the kind of games you play using challenge preferences
There are also some unofficial (unsupported) ways to impact the service look and behaviour:
Users of firefox and mozilla may take a look at GreaseMonkey scripts
or even at the firefox extension
CategoryUnfinished