Learnings from Personalization Strategies
With AI dominating all the airtime and apparently making the wheels of the Economy move ahead, it’s worth reminding some prescient aspects that were written about AI a few years ago, and what it was about to impact. Namely understanding users at a scale, new interfaces, optimizing permutations, identifying opportunities, and predicting and personalizing features. The latter aspect is the one I want to spend some time reflecting upon, since in all the years I’ve been working in software design (and releases), the topic of personalization always pops up, with different teams understanding it in their particular manner. Here’s what I’ve assessed thus far.
Personalization is a form of storytelling. This means that any product solution that is crafted, and that weaves itself around user journeys, has to contemplate how a user adopts it, leverages it, and makes that solution part of a vernacular that is very much his/her own. This also means, that personalization has to go beyond the aspect of having a string of text on a dashboard that welcomes a certain user to part of the UI. This also means that if you bring a user to a certain ecosystem, and ask for that same user to provide a considerable amount of information about himself/herself, there has to be something about that experience that goes beyond sending polished newsletters on certain topics for those users. The tradeoff between what you ask from the user, and what the user gets from utilization has to be substantial. Tasks have to be performed, and product solutions are utilitarian after all, however if you’re asking users to share certain information about who they are and how they work, that same solution has to deliver something that latches on to the specific traits of that user (or at least to certain typifications of behaviors exhibited by users). The days of getting information from users in order to sell more are insufficient. Users expect more, and if they’re not getting it from the solution you have crafted, they’ll look elsewhere. What does this mean for storytelling? It means that whatever journey you take your users on, make sure they feel involved in it, that the solution resonates with their aspirations, needs, and goals. When I worked on Fitness app, part of the personalization journey for that particular product was all about empowering users to create milestones, goals for themselves on a weekly basis. The tool was supporting tracking users on a journey they were crafting for themselves, a wellness journey. Whatever the journey users find themselves in, be it wellness, warehouse replenishment, food ordering, clothes shopping, making sure they feel seen, and most of all integrated, is imperative.
Personalization goes beyond knowing a name. Users get asked to join rewards programs all the time. These rewards programs entice the user with freebies, and in exchange ask for loyalty and all sorts of information from those users. One of the most common examples is for instance the loyalty programs from Hotel chains. The user joins those programs, in the hopes that by making reservations on that particular chain, points will be accrued, and eventually the user will have the opportunity to redeem those points for free reservations. In the interim and until that becomes a reality, most of the times what Hotels have resorted to adopting, is a strategy where upon getting your hotel room, the user sees their name pop up on the screen of their smart TV, welcoming them to the property. While that is undoubtedly a nice touch, it does leave for a considerable amount of questions. If a user is part of a rewards program, and if upon enrolling all this information about the user is captured, why not provide recommendations on items, activities, menu items, all this paraphernalia of elements that tie back with what the user provided. Bring personalization to the user, based on what the user has indicated when joining the rewards program. Knowing a name is wonderful, but understanding a user, predicting needs and satisfying them, is even better.
Learn. Wikipedia defines Personalization as “(broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or product to accommodate specific individuals. It is sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. Personalization involves collecting data on individuals, including web browsing history, web cookies, and location. Various organizations use personalization (along with the opposite mechanism of popularization) to improve customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for advertising. Personalization acts as a key element in social media and recommender systems. Personalization influences every sector of society — be it work, leisure, or citizenship.” It’s a stellar definition and hits many of the aspects I mentioned previously. Personalization has the ability to understand where users are (courtesy of geo location), in order to provide services for them that are pertinent to their location. However and at a time when misinformation is rampant, and where people are fearful for malicious utilization of their data (this aspect comes across all the research endeavors I’ve performed with users, across various industries), and ultimately their privacy, if a product does ask or demand for users to provide a certain level of personal information, they have to be willing to surrender something that feels of palpable value for those users. And that means, learning from them as they use your product solutions, but also those of your competitors, of indirect competitors on the market. Understanding an ecosystem goes beyond just learning about what makes your own clients satisfied. It includes understanding where the potential to lure others lie. When I worked on a payments app, one of the most revelatory aspects from that research, went beyond the typical digital payment driven aspects tied to it, it was the expectation from users of being able to pay with actual currency. At a time when everyone is talking about digital coins, bitcoins, and currency is being reinterpreted (even if Gold is at sky high value), it’s worth considering that not everyone is at the same level of digital adoption, not everyone is a stickler to digital currencies, and not everyone has the same digital commitment level to certain solutions (check my article on that topic here). Ultimately my point is, leveraging AI, researching the market, understanding the economy and the overall ecosystem, allows for Personalization strategies to be more sensical, more rewarding, as opposed to merely stickling to newsletters that aim to sell further (and that eventually get deleted, if they even manage to get delivered successfully to their intended inboxes).
Personalization doesn’t fix badly crafted solutions. When working across product solutions, one has to have the qualities I’ve mentioned countless times regarding long lasting brands: self-awareness, principles, being deliberate, having focus, and always being adaptive. Being self-aware, also includes being able to learn from the process of building a solution, listening to users and clients, being able and willing to refine, and understand that solutions need to evolve, and are not set in stone (the product is released, “pour the cement”). It also means, being able to do internal and external retrospectives, and acknowledge that at times releases are faulty, products aren’t crafted with the level of thoroughness they should have, that ultimately not all was contemplated when that MVP was released. Personalization is at times brandished and advocated as something that can address some problems, and while indeed it can improve the overall product experience, if done purposefully and with the user in mind, if a product solution has structural issues that need to be addressed, or functional ones that were omitted, personalization won’t magically solve all those problems. It’s not a Trojan Horse, it’s not William Tell, and it’s not Ripley coming to save the marines: it can be a powerful part of the storytelling, but it won’t salvage a poorly executed product.
From all the product experiences that I have been a part of, and those that have been deployed to market, Personalization has always been a chapter of a larger storytelling, not its goal, and never its anchor. The goal has always been to understand users, clients, and introduce a personalization layer as a means to create further resonance, loyalty, and delight. Adding layers of value, not gratuitously brandishing Personalization just because it’s a hot topic, or a hollow statement. Know your client, know your user, understand the ecosystem in which they live, and tailor experiences for how they exist, not how one expects them to behave.
I’ll end this article with a quote from Aldous Huxley:
“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
Learnings from Personalization Strategies was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
المصدر: المصدر الأصلي
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With AI dominating all the airtime and apparently making the wheels of the Economy move ahead, it’s worth reminding some prescient aspects that were written about AI a few years ago, and what it was about to impact. Namely understanding users at a scale, new interfaces, optimizing permutations, identifying opportunities, and predicting and personalizing features. The latter aspect is the one I want to spend some time reflecting upon, since in all the years I’ve been working in software design (and releases), the topic of personalization always pops up, with different teams understanding it in their particular manner. Here’s what I’ve assessed thus far.
Personalization is a form of storytelling. This means that any product solution that is crafted, and that weaves itself around user journeys, has to contemplate how a user adopts it, leverages it, and makes that solution part of a vernacular that is very much his/her own. This also means, that personalization has to go beyond the aspect of having a string of text on a dashboard that welcomes a certain user to part of the UI. This also means that if you bring a user to a certain ecosystem, and ask for that same user to provide a considerable amount of information about himself/herself, there has to be something about that experience that goes beyond sending polished newsletters on certain topics for those users. The tradeoff between what you ask from the user, and what the user gets from utilization has to be substantial. Tasks have to be performed, and product solutions are utilitarian after all, however if you’re asking users to share certain information about who they are and how they work, that same solution has to deliver something that latches on to the specific traits of that user (or at least to certain typifications of behaviors exhibited by users). The days of getting information from users in order to sell more are insufficient. Users expect more, and if they’re not getting it from the solution you have crafted, they’ll look elsewhere. What does this mean for storytelling? It means that whatever journey you take your users on, make sure they feel involved in it, that the solution resonates with their aspirations, needs, and goals. When I worked on Fitness app, part of the personalization journey for that particular product was all about empowering users to create milestones, goals for themselves on a weekly basis. The tool was supporting tracking users on a journey they were crafting for themselves, a wellness journey. Whatever the journey users find themselves in, be it wellness, warehouse replenishment, food ordering, clothes shopping, making sure they feel seen, and most of all integrated, is imperative.
Personalization goes beyond knowing a name. Users get asked to join rewards programs all the time. These rewards programs entice the user with freebies, and in exchange ask for loyalty and all sorts of information from those users. One of the most common examples is for instance the loyalty programs from Hotel chains. The user joins those programs, in the hopes that by making reservations on that particular chain, points will be accrued, and eventually the user will have the opportunity to redeem those points for free reservations. In the interim and until that becomes a reality, most of the times what Hotels have resorted to adopting, is a strategy where upon getting your hotel room, the user sees their name pop up on the screen of their smart TV, welcoming them to the property. While that is undoubtedly a nice touch, it does leave for a considerable amount of questions. If a user is part of a rewards program, and if upon enrolling all this information about the user is captured, why not provide recommendations on items, activities, menu items, all this paraphernalia of elements that tie back with what the user provided. Bring personalization to the user, based on what the user has indicated when joining the rewards program. Knowing a name is wonderful, but understanding a user, predicting needs and satisfying them, is even better.
Learn. Wikipedia defines Personalization as “(broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or product to accommodate specific individuals. It is sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. Personalization involves collecting data on individuals, including web browsing history, web cookies, and location. Various organizations use personalization (along with the opposite mechanism of popularization) to improve customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for advertising. Personalization acts as a key element in social media and recommender systems. Personalization influences every sector of society — be it work, leisure, or citizenship.” It’s a stellar definition and hits many of the aspects I mentioned previously. Personalization has the ability to understand where users are (courtesy of geo location), in order to provide services for them that are pertinent to their location. However and at a time when misinformation is rampant, and where people are fearful for malicious utilization of their data (this aspect comes across all the research endeavors I’ve performed with users, across various industries), and ultimately their privacy, if a product does ask or demand for users to provide a certain level of personal information, they have to be willing to surrender something that feels of palpable value for those users. And that means, learning from them as they use your product solutions, but also those of your competitors, of indirect competitors on the market. Understanding an ecosystem goes beyond just learning about what makes your own clients satisfied. It includes understanding where the potential to lure others lie. When I worked on a payments app, one of the most revelatory aspects from that research, went beyond the typical digital payment driven aspects tied to it, it was the expectation from users of being able to pay with actual currency. At a time when everyone is talking about digital coins, bitcoins, and currency is being reinterpreted (even if Gold is at sky high value), it’s worth considering that not everyone is at the same level of digital adoption, not everyone is a stickler to digital currencies, and not everyone has the same digital commitment level to certain solutions (check my article on that topic here). Ultimately my point is, leveraging AI, researching the market, understanding the economy and the overall ecosystem, allows for Personalization strategies to be more sensical, more rewarding, as opposed to merely stickling to newsletters that aim to sell further (and that eventually get deleted, if they even manage to get delivered successfully to their intended inboxes).
Personalization doesn’t fix badly crafted solutions. When working across product solutions, one has to have the qualities I’ve mentioned countless times regarding long lasting brands: self-awareness, principles, being deliberate, having focus, and always being adaptive. Being self-aware, also includes being able to learn from the process of building a solution, listening to users and clients, being able and willing to refine, and understand that solutions need to evolve, and are not set in stone (the product is released, “pour the cement”). It also means, being able to do internal and external retrospectives, and acknowledge that at times releases are faulty, products aren’t crafted with the level of thoroughness they should have, that ultimately not all was contemplated when that MVP was released. Personalization is at times brandished and advocated as something that can address some problems, and while indeed it can improve the overall product experience, if done purposefully and with the user in mind, if a product solution has structural issues that need to be addressed, or functional ones that were omitted, personalization won’t magically solve all those problems. It’s not a Trojan Horse, it’s not William Tell, and it’s not Ripley coming to save the marines: it can be a powerful part of the storytelling, but it won’t salvage a poorly executed product.
From all the product experiences that I have been a part of, and those that have been deployed to market, Personalization has always been a chapter of a larger storytelling, not its goal, and never its anchor. The goal has always been to understand users, clients, and introduce a personalization layer as a means to create further resonance, loyalty, and delight. Adding layers of value, not gratuitously brandishing Personalization just because it’s a hot topic, or a hollow statement. Know your client, know your user, understand the ecosystem in which they live, and tailor experiences for how they exist, not how one expects them to behave.
I’ll end this article with a quote from Aldous Huxley:
“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
Learnings from Personalization Strategies was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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