Are you ready for Individualized Experiences?
If you've been involved in digital design for a while, you've likely encountered "personalized experiences" – partially tailored digital experiences based on a user profile or their data. Website personalization dates back to the mid-1990s when online retailers, like Amazon, began suggesting products based on customers' previous purchases and pioneered personalized recommendations based on shopping habits.
Alongside personalization, personas have played a crucial role in crafting targeted experiences. Alan Cooper developed the concept of a user persona in the early 1980s, and Roger Clarke coined the term "digital persona" in 1992. Cooper created the first persona, Kathy, in 1985 while developing a project management software program, using user interviews to understand their needs and enhance user-friendliness.
For decades, we've been shaping mass-personalization. Personas have allowed us to better understand and empathize with the needs of different audience segments, while personalization has enabled us to deliver more relevant, user-friendly experiences. As digital solutions have become increasingly mature and complex, they often result in an over abundance of features and a paradox of too many choices, reducing usability. Personalization is often a critical tool in helping to mitigate or mask this complexity.
Personalization is not without its flaws though. Persona and audience segment research is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and without an abundance of data, subjectivity can still influence how personas are crafted and leveraged. Personas can become stale if they aren’t refreshed with new insights and data. The personalized experiences often aren't truly personal to an individual, but rather one of a few pre-built scenarios based on the personas we identified, often limited to variations of specific components or pages. Creating personalization requires an effort to design and build multiple variations. Lastly, and perhaps because of these prior investments, businesses may not invest in measuring how personalization is impacting their bottom line.
We are ripe for change.
The appeal of harnessing the power of AI is our ability to create Individualized Experiences that are hyper-personalized, adaptive, that cater to each user's unique needs, preferences, and behaviors in real-time. By leveraging AI, we can create more engaging, efficient, and impactful digital solutions, and likely do so with a lower cost to serve.
As digital tools evolve from passive websites and portals to active assistants and collaborators, how will this impact the cost to serve, competitive advantage, and user loyalty?
Imagine an e-learning platform that adapts to your learning style, pace, and knowledge gaps. The platform could analyze your performance on quizzes and assignments, as well as your interactions with the content, to dynamically adjust the course material. It might provide additional resources on topics you find challenging, suggest alternative explanations for concepts you struggle with, or even adapt the delivery format to suit your preferences (e.g., more visual aids, interactive elements, or audio content).
Or a shipping portal that proactively alerts you about stalled shipments that need their electronic manifest data corrected, cues those actions up, and may even offer to assist in resolving those issues, saving you time and effort.
While I enjoy noodling what's next with digital experiences, I think it's valuable to consider a few things we can do today to prepare for the future of Individualized Experiences:
Enhance your personas: Go beyond demographic reflections and infuse empathy, depth, and insights about unique user needs. Generative AI tools can help to confirm assumptions, enhance storytelling, visualize personas engaging in key interactions, and help brainstorm on solutions that meet those user needs.
Modernize your design systems: Ensure your design patterns and systems are modular, flexible, and AI-ready. Think of them as the Lego blocks for crafting individualized experiences. Brad Frost's Atomic Design methodology, which involves breaking down design elements into smaller, reusable components (atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages), can be a great primer or refresher on creating adaptable, scalable design systems that are well-suited for delivering individualized experiences.
Evaluate your data strategy: Assess the data you are collecting on users, ensure it's ethically sourced and managed, and explore how it can power individualized experiences while respecting user privacy.
Collaborate with data : Successful solutions often emerge from the convergence and collaboration of business, user, and technology perspectives. Embrace data as a critical collaborator in the design process, using insights derived from user interactions to inform decision-making and drive continuous improvement. Consider establishing a data-driven culture that empowers teams to experiment, learn, and adapt quickly based on user feedback and evolving needs.
Prioritize ethics and transparency: Establish clear guidelines around AI usage, mitigate biases, and maintain a balance between personalization and privacy. Be transparent with users about how their data is used and give them control over their preferences.
For those who are eager to stay ahead of the curve, now is the time to start experimenting with AI tools and technologies. By exploring the capabilities of generative AI, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies, designers and organizations can gain valuable insights and experience that will give them a first-mover advantage as the technology for individualized experiences matures.
The journey ahead is exciting, and I'm eager to see how we, as a community of digital design innovators, will shape the future of individualized experiences.