Unpacking personalisation.

There’s no more personal trait than empathy, actually being able to sense and feel what another person is experiencing. It’s known as one of the most common traits in designers as well, and for good reason. When digital experiences are made to kind of, wrap around the user - it’s no less than magic - although in my experience, achieving this is really hard to do, and takes a lot of work not just building strategy and tactics, but having the right people around you - with the passion of building fantastic customer experience. These people keep the momentum up, scaling the successful approaches, and learning from the many that fail. It’s always a long and fascinating journey.

Speaking of journeys, there’s probably nor better place to start, when planing your personalisation, than creating a baseline understanding of the ways your users navigate the experience you have designed. In fact I reckon success depends on it.

So how do we get going in terms of building a framework? One place to start is getting some baselines defined where we can get some understanding of the current state of the site, while looking for traffic patterns, impact pages, decision points, and landing environments. These are all good places to start brainstorming around personalisation tactics, leaving targeted content and information pages to do the heavy lifting around profiling and segmentation.

Above and beyond all this, building an understanding of the user’s journey is one of the most important artefacts. If you look at it truly end to end, from acquisition to engagement and exit it’s a lot easier to find the gaps, and see the opportunities. Even more importantly, where the best areas might be to start measuring. Where, and what channels is our traffic coming from, and what are those visitors looking at on-site, how many pages viewed and quality of visit will vary. This is for sure one of the best metrics to examine to cover quick wins. Double down on what’s working, and unpack what’s not - and you’ll be on the way to building great digital experience.