Personalisation

It is human to want abundance but to chase scarcity. This behaviour of sapiens is fascinating. Now that we have handled the basic aspects of user experience hierarchy like functionality, reliability, durability and even usability, it is time to move up the ladder towards pleasure and significance. Following the order the next highest form of sophistication and scarcity is personalisation.

Personalisation is already here in its nascent form. Amazon to Spotify to Netflix, we already feel the goodness of personalisation. The main goal of personalization is to deliver content and functionality that matches specific user needs or interests, with no effort from the targeted users. The system profiles the user and adjusts the interface and its content according to the profile specifics.

Sometimes it is irritating when the ML (Machine learning) is dumb and gets you wrong but to a large extent we are tolerant and even happy when the interface speaks to you in the form of "your daily mix" or "98% match".

Here are some considerations for personalisation design 👇

• Let's start with a myth buster. Using mail merge is not personalisation 🙈 It is much deeper than that. Just by calling your user with their first name by a bot doesn't make them feel better 🤷‍♀️
• Responsible data collection from different touch points will help you to improve the experience throughout the customer journey. 69% of customers are "ok" to give their private data to the business for personalisation. They just don't want the information to be shared outside the company. They are generally happy with real-time, personalised content across all channels.
• Deep dive into data collected from the user (implicit), contextual data provided by the user (location, device) and data collected based on dynamic user behaviours (explicit) to gather insights into dynamic customer journeys. You'll be surprised to see how much your user will reciprocate to the algorithmic understanding.
• Take into account for changing emotions/moods while personalising customer journeys. A number of products fail to address these aspects right now.

Both abundance and scarcity are appreciated by the customer. So allow the customer to beat the choice fatigue of abundance and get the goodness of scarcity by curating the feed. Netflix handles this well by giving "play something" feature to beat abundance and specific recommendations for a user profile based on contextual and explicit data.

I wonder why Netflix is not yet high on implicit personalisation 🧐

🥂 to algorithms!