Personalization Pyramid: A Framework for Designing with User Data

As a UX skilled in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s extremely likely that you’ve been asked to design a personal digital experience, whether it’s a common website, user portal, or local application. Despite there still be a lot of marketing hype surrounding personalization systems, there are still very some standardized methods for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we come in. We set ourselves the challenge of developing a systematic personalization framework especially for UX practitioners after finishing dozens of personalization tasks over the past few years. The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered personalisation programs, spanning information, classification, content delivery, and general goals. By using this strategy, you will be able to understand the core components of a modern, UX-driven personalization system ( or at the very least understand enough to get started ).

Getting Started

For the sake of this article, we’ll suppose you’re already familiar with the basics of online personalization. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic projects in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently start from the same place.

Popular circumstances for launching a personalization task:

Your business or client made a purchase to personalize their content management system ( CMS ), marketing automation platform ( MAP ), or other related technology.
The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified personalisation as a target
User data is disjointed or confusing
You are conducting some sporadic targeting or A/B assessment.
On the personalisation approach, parties of contention
Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

A powerful personalization system will need the same fundamental building blocks regardless of where you begin. We’ve captured these as the “levels” on the tower. Whether you are a UX artist, scholar, or planner, understanding the core components may help make your contribution effective.

From top to bottom, the amounts include:

Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
Touchpoints: Where will the personalized experience become served?
Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
User Divisions: What constitutes a special, suitable market?
Actionable Data: What trustworthy and credible information is collected by our specialized software to improve personalization?
Natural Data: What wider set of data is potentially available ( now in our environment ) allowing you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts sequentially. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them useful in brainstorming about personalisation, so we’ll provide examples for you here.

Beginning at the Top

The parts of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

With your personalisation plan, whether large or small, you aim for a general north star. The North Star identifies the personalization program’s (one ) overall goal. What do you wish to perform? North Stars cast a ghost. The bigger the sun, the bigger the dark. Example of North Starts may contain:

Feature: Self-contained customisation componentry. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
Experience: Personal user experiences across numerous interactions and consumer flows. Examples: Email campaigns, landing pages, advanced messaging ( i. e. C2C chat ) or conversational interfaces, larger user flows and content-intensive optimizations ( localization ).
Solution: Highly differentiating customized product experiences. Example: Standalone, branded experience with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Northern light cards. These can assist in guiding your staff toward a common objective that personalization will support the achievement of. Additionally, these can be used to describe the ambivalent objective of the pending personalization effort.

Goals

As in any great UX design, personalization may help promote designing with client intentions. The goals serve as the military and tangible indicators of the success of the entire program. Start with your existing analytics and measurement system, as well as indicators you can benchmark against. In some cases, new targets may be suitable. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalisation is certainly a desired outcome. Common targets include:

Conversion
Time on work
Net promoter score ( NPS)
Client satisfaction

Focus accounts. Cases of some frequently used and quantifiable personalisation KPIs.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where personalisation takes place. As a UX artist, this will be one of your largest areas of responsibility. The touchpoints you have will depend on how your personalization and the related technology are implemented, and they should be based on enhancing a person’s encounter at a specific point in the journey. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ) but also more granular ( web banner, web pop-up etc. ). Here are some examples:

Channel-level Touchpoints

Email: Role
Email: Period of empty
In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
Native game
Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

Web overlay
Web call bar
Web symbol
Web content wall
Web list

Touchpoint accounts. Examples of common personalization touchpoints: these can vary from narrow ( e. g., email ) to broad ( e. g., in-store ).

If you’re designing for online interface, for instance, you will likely need to include personal “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next action, context, and campaigns, the articles for these can be presented dynamically in touchpoints.

Targeted Zones: Illustrations of personalized “zones” on page-level wireframes that occur at various stages of the user journey ( purchase phase at right and engagement phase at right ).

Origin:” Essential Guide to End-to-End Personaliztion” by Kibo.

Contexts and Campaigns

After you’ve outlined some touchpoints, you may consider the actual personal information a user may acquire. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed automatically to specific customer sections, as defined by consumer data. At this stage, we find it helpful to contemplate two distinct concepts: a framework design and a willing design. The environment helps you consider the level of user engagement at the customisation moment, for instance, if they are just lightly browsing information rather than engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in terms of behavior in data retrieval. The content model can then guide you in deciding which personalization to use in terms of the context ( for instance, an” Enrich” campaign that features related articles might be a good substitute for extant content ).

Personalization Context Model:

Browse
Skim
Nudge
Feast

Personalization Content Model:

Alert
Create Easier
Cross-Sell
Enrich

We’ve written a lot about each of these concepts abroad, so if you’d like to learn more, check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

Campaign and environment cards: This level of the tower can assist your team in focusing on the uses for end users and the personalization options that are available.

User Divisions

User segments may be created based on consumer research, either prescriptively or flexibly ( for example, using principles and logic tied to set user actions or through A/B testing ). You will need to think about how to treat the logged-in visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or another post-cookie identifier ), or the authenticated visitor who is logged in at the very least. The personalisation pyramid has some of the following instances:

Unknown
Guest
Authenticated
Default
Referred
Role
Cohort
Unique ID

Segment accounts. Examples of common personalization parts: at a minimum, you will need to acquire the private, host, and logged in user forms. Classification can become incredibly complicated from there.

Actionable Data

Every business with a online presence has information. It’s a matter of examining what user data you can ethically collect, its inherent reliability and value, and how you can use it ( sometimes referred to as “data activation” ). Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party information: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of firms are using at least some type of first-party information to personalize the customer experience.

First-party information represents multiple benefits on the UX before, including being relatively simple to acquire, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep issue” of third-party information. Therefore, determining which method of data collection is best for your audiences should be a crucial component of your UX strategy. Here are some examples:

When it comes to recognizing and making decisions about various audiences and their signals, there is a trend of profiling. As time and confidence and data volume increase, it varies to more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users.

Although some combination of implicit and explicit data is typically required for any implementation ( more commonly known as first party and third-party data ), ML efforts are typically not cost-effective right away. This is because optimization requires a strong data backbone and content repository. These approaches, however, should be taken into account as part of the overall plan and may in fact help to speed up the organization’s progress overall. At this point, you will typically work with key stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes a defining framework for setting up profiles, profile keys, profile cards, and pattern cards. A multi-faceted approach to profiling which makes it scalable.

Pulling it Together

The cards serve as a starting point for an inventory of sorts ( we offer blanks for you to customize your own ), a set of potential levers and motivations for the personalization activities you aspire to deliver, but they are more valuable when grouped together.

One can begin to trace the entire course of a card’s “hand” from leadership focus down to a strategic and tactical execution. It serves as the foundation for the workshops that both co-authors have conducted to build a program backlog, which would make a good article topic.

In the meantime, it is important to note that each colored class of cards is helpful in understanding the range of options that you might have, as well as making informed choices about who, where, when, and how, will be made these choices.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. There is simply no “easy button” where a personalization program can be stood up and immediately see meaningful results, even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there. That said, there is a common grammar to all personalization activities, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.