What sort of personalization are we talking about?

We think about personalization at four levels:

Customization – the explicit statement of preferences, for example:

  • I like my data in tables as well as charts
  • I have deuteranomaly colour vision deficiency
  • I have cerebral palsy.

Crowd – learning from collective behaviors, for example:

  • People who ask that question prefer this presentation …
  • People who do that expect to see advanced tools.

Segmentation – identifying similarities between individuals, for example:

  • People like you prefer simple language summaries without charts
  • People like you relish comparative / benchmarking information
  • People like you love to run regression analyses.

Unique – implicit, interpreting the individual’s proclivities uniquely:

  • Setting up a pension HI based on an existing banking HI
  • Turning signposting off after three sessions, ‘as normal’
  • Offering up an end-of-month fitness report, ‘as usual’.