Time to get personal with on-line profiles
By Mark Bolgiano, ISG Solutions, Rockville MD
The following article was
published in Association Trends, April 18, 2003.
Personalization is an aspect of website design that is
rapidly transitioning from a "feature" to a "requirement."
Yet you can ask 10 people what "personalization" means and receive
10 different answers. To some, it means being greeted by name; to others,
a "MyAssn" concept.
Why does Web personalization mean different things to
different people? Perhaps it's because the information can originate from
at least 3 sources, and be applied for a multitude of purposes, including
cross-product mapping, content mgmt and security.
For example, the data may originate from the user, who
has provided it for the express purpose of personalization, giving the user
a degree of control over their Web experience. This would include being able
to choose and store preferences regarding how a site looks, which site is the
default or "home" page, or which news topics someone wants to see when he
gets to a site.
The 2nd origin of information, very common in assn sites,
is a profile stored in a membership system, in which demographic, geographic,
industry or other data is used to grant or limit access. Access can be
based on membership class, committee participation, or payment of a fee
for a specific on-line service.
A 3rd origin of intelligence used by a personalization
system might be from passive capture. This means that the content provider
(the website) captures where you go and what you do (probably without your
knowledge) and uses this information to take some degree of control over what
navigation options you're offered and what you see when content is presented.
Data based on behavior patterns might be combined with data from others who
match a user's profile. This allows websites to identify and map patterns
such as what we buy, what words we put into a search dialog, or what page
seems to trigger a departure from the website.
The best applications for personalization focus on increasing
user convenience: fewer clicks, fewer pages, fewer seconds to the desired
information. "Suggestion" or "helper" elements draw from
all 3 sources of
information (the user's preferences, profile, and current interactions
with the site) with precedence given to the user's immediate interactions.
If your profile indicates an interest in industry standards,
but you just searched for "networking events," a well-personalized
site will take you within a click of viewing and registering for a
networking event, perhaps narrowing the list down to likely choices based
on your geographic location or previous events attended.
With Web-page real estate at such a premium, and the Web
user's time and attention span also in short supply, any personalization
strategy should concentrate on user convenience as the top criteria.
No matter what your site offers, it will be wise to assume that all
users will have alternative places on the Internet to look for it...
your site must not only have the best collection of content, but the
shortest and quickest path to that information.
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