Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Nikita Gangwal

How the user experience can be taken to the next level using in-app personalization.

Personalization of an app or of any product definitely takes its user experience to the next level by giving users an extra something useful without them having to ask for it. Tell me who wouldn’t like to receive some amazing recommendations when you visit a new place? Or to receive some quick suggestions on easy breakfast recipes every morning? Or when your navigation app pays close attention to your usage patterns and carefully asks you if you are heading home at 6:00 PM daily? And all of this without you having to ask for it. Humans tend to like it when somebody (in this case something) takes care of them and shares the workload.

So what is personalization?

Personalization happens when the system curates the information, functionality or content to user’s need and expectations and that too all in real time. Apps deploy a technology in their system that learns from the user’s data to provide users an experience most unique to them.

Why Personalize?

People like it more when the app provides individual experiences when interacting with them. It makes users feel more special and connected. Think of it in this way, if an app has no single element of personalization, it may feel like it is not helping you much even when it is. To give you a clear understanding, let’s take an example of Spotify Running, now this is a tool added by Spotify to help & motivate joggers. It matches music to your running tempo to keep you motivated to move through your run. It uses your phone’s sensors to detect your steps per minute and finds tracks with a similar beat. But without this highly personalized tool, Spotify Running is nothing but a simple music app Spotify. Now don’t get me wrong, Spotify is great when it comes to listening music from our favorite playlist. But going a step ahead and personalizing the brand definitely makes it more appealing to its certain set of users as it takes care of their pain points and needs in a right way. This helps to create an instant bond in between users and the app which in turn means loyalty towards the brand.

When executed effectively, personalization will give you many more users with great loyalty and affinity towards your brand and will help produce significantly more revenue over a long term. Studies show that users tend to act quickly when facing the “closing the deal” situations when brands provide a great user experience.

How to do it right

Research Research & Research: You should never ever skip this step. Understand if your brand needs personalization, if yes, know how much is enough. Find out what matters to your users, what are their limits and if what you are doing is relevant to the variety of your audiences.

Make it Simple & Natural: Experience is not good if users spend even a second in confusion when using the app. As personalization is a step towards giving that flawless experience, it should be so smooth that it should be almost unnoticeable.

Test & Iterate: This is as critical as the research step. The only way to find out what you are doing is right is by testing your audiences. Many times you will be surprised to see the insights from these testings. And it will help you provide tailor-made experience to your every single user.

Apps that rock personalization

Let’s take a look at few more brands that totally nailed personalization.

Luminosity

Picture credit: Luminosity

This is a brain training app that curate training activities based on user’s everyday performance and skill level making it a highly personalized app. The active adaptation makes it really interesting and fun to use.

Airbnb

Picture credit: Airbnb

According to the company, the newly updated Airbnb mobile app has personalization at its heart. Once you get to your destination, Airbnb provides you the guidebook which offers millions of insider tips for that city. The guidebook will offer the best restaurants, experience, attractions in the area straight from community hosts who live in that area.

Netflix

Picture credit: Netflix

Netflix attempts to personalize its platform by recommending users movies and series similar to something they’ve watched. Netflix successfully does this using some complex algorithm which monitors users viewing history and user ratings.

Yummly

Picture credit: Yummly

Yummly, one of the popular websites that help find recipes specially catered to user’s food preferences and limitations. When on-boarding, it asks the user to set the filters that best represents his/her food preferences. It then uses these filters and user’s search patterns to recommend recipes that perfectly matches the expectations.

When personalization goes wrong..

Not taking enough care when creating personalized experience can damage not only your bond, the trust you have built with this customer but also it can affect the image of your brand. Hence knowing your user is the key when it comes to staying away from making such huge mistakes. Simply put, personalization is effective if it serves up the right amount at the right time for the right person.

Know your audience!

What happens when you make assumptions and direct information at a really wrong time and to the wrong audience? You may think that at worst, a personalization mistake is a simple error that won’t hurt your overall brand reputation. Unfortunately, when e-commerce marketing goes wrong, it can go very, very wrong. Now, this is not an exactly relevant example but I think it conveys the idea. Consider the customer experience nightmare scenario below:

Credits: Zaius.com

This Father’s Day ad is a perfect example of what NOT to do when targeting customers. This ad assumes a lot about potential buyers, and sometimes, those assumptions are wrong. While a brand may not intend to cause pain, this is clearly an egregious case of targeting gone wrong. You can learn more about such examples over here.

Few important tips:

Use personalization to add value and not just because you feel it is important to use.
Do not make assumptions about your target audience. Research and test until you get complete and accurate information.
If it goes too far, personalization becomes creepy.
Remember, the user experience is good when personalization happens in a subtle and unnoticeable manner.

Future of Personalization

The trend of personalization is continuously evolving. The most traditional way of personalization is referring to users by their name or presenting relevant content using keyword-matching strategy. Currently, we see in-app personalization in all the forms that are seen in above examples. But, I believe, soon machine learning will take this trend to a whole new level of perfection by intelligently understanding the “story” of user’s qualitative data and continuously adapting to other factors as users go through different stages of life. It will help apps provide you an amazing experience in the form of personalization. It will work very similar to how your voice assistants work these days, but more mature.

This is my very first attempt at writing a blog. Please do let me know if you have any feedback, thoughts or comments.

Personalization trend in UX was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Personalization trend in UX

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