Episode 144 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with Colin Eagan and Jeffrey MacIntyre. Colin and Jeffrey work for different companies, but they’re both focused on designing more personalized experiences. They’ve collaborated on articles, presentations, and a deck of cards on the subject.
What is personalization? Jeffrey framed it broadly as “any change or expression of an experience that is tailored to a specific audience.” He elaborated by contrasting it with two other related concepts: customization and automation:
when we talk about customization, the quickest way to familiarize somebody with what that means is to go into any given software product that you use, log in, and go to the system preferences or settings page. There will be options there that are customization functions. I want a newsletter. I don’t want the newsletter. I want this kind of newsletter. Here’s my avatar. This is my given pronoun. All of those things are ways that you have agency as an end user to tailor the presentation of your experience and how others see you in that product setting.
In personalization, inferences are made either by machines or humans with business logic or algorithms that then determine and shape your experience. Those same decisions get made, but not by the end user. The trade-off is supposed to be a mixture of serendipity, speed, and just delight in progressing a user to the outcome that they desire.
And now, with automation, it’s just a slightly different flavor where you’re taking any given series of steps in a user flow and shrinking it down. So let’s say it takes eight screens to do an onboarding, but there’s a guest mode that, in e-commerce, there’s often a guest mode. Instead of registering for a site, you can just quickly bypass all that registration and go straight to the transaction.
Personalization improves user experiences, making them more relevant and engaging. When done well, the results feel natural and useful. But when done poorly, the result is something we’ve all experienced: “overfitting,” which is when a system (e.g., an ecommerce platform) keeps trying to sell us more of something we’ve already bought.
Doing it well requires a deep understanding of both the technologies and data available. Artificial intelligence is expanding the scope of how systems can offer personalized experiences to users, but there are ethical and practical challenges in implementing AI-driven personalization systems.
There’s also a changing context around personalization. Users expect both better experiences and greater transparency, driven by more sophisticated mental models and evolving legal frameworks.
As a result, using personalization thoughtfully becomes more important. Colin and Jeffrey are contributing to the conversation with useful frameworks and tools. I was glad to be able to discuss the subject with them.
The Informed Life episode 144: Colin Eagan and Jeffrey MacIntyre on Personalization