The Dangers of Personalization

Personalization is coming to technical communication, and the results may not be pretty. n offering the individual an opportunity to pick and choose among XML content objects, we risk causing confusion when the organization of the site appears to shift, and familiar landmarks disappear. Critical content may become invisible to the user. The very process of creating preferences, custom options, or an entire personal profile adds a complex distraction that many users may resent, because it takes them away from their original task for so long that they forget what they were doing. Even advanced search mechanisms, which promise to pinpoint the exact information object the user wants, risk baffling users with their own complexity.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (2001). Presentations>Information Design>Personalization

You and Me: Making Technical Communication Personal

Text of talk presented at the 48th International Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, Chicago, IL, May 2001. We are moving toward an audience of one. Beyond the great mass. Beyond niches, micromarkets, subgroups, demographic clusters. Communicating with one person at a time.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The. Presentations>Information Design>Personalization

Information Architecture and Personalized User Experiences  

The information architect focuses on how things are structured within the user experience: looks “up” to the user interface – how the navigation and page layout convey the structure; looks “down” to the content management to make sure it can enable to right user experience.

Instone, Keith. Instone.org (2003). Presentations>Web Design>Information Design>Personalization