Patterns of Personalization

I’ve been thinking recently about the role of ‘advanced search’, i.e. the practice whereby some sites withhold certain aspects of functionality from ‘standard’ search and accommodate them instead within a separate search experience. Now, there’s a longer story to the rationale and value in doing this (which I’ll cover in a subsequent post), but it reminded me of the following presentation which addresses the issues of audience segmentation and personalization more generally. In particular, it describes an attempt to develop a framework for understanding the various types of personalization seen online and define them in terms of their fundamental characteristics.

To test it we applied it to a few notable instances to see where they would fit. The outcome revealed personalization types that could exist in theory, but don’t in practice – which of course starts you wondering why. I should point out that the ‘research’ behind this was relatively modest, so it’s by no means the final word, but it’s interesting food for thought (until I get round to writing a proper piece on ‘advanced search’