Personalization Pyramid: A Framework for Designing with User Data

In tomorrow’s data-driven environment, it’s becoming more and more common for a UX specialist to be asked to create a personal digital experience, whether it’s a common website, user portal, or local application. However while there continues to be no lack of marketing buzz around personalization systems, we also have very few defined approaches for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we come in. After completing tens of personalisation projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a purpose: could you make a systematic personalization platform especially for UX practitioners? The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric framework for establishing human-centered personalization initiatives that cover data, classification, content delivery, and overall objectives. By using this strategy, you will be able to understand the core elements of a modern, UX-driven personalization system ( or at the very least understand enough to get started ).

Getting Started

We’ll assume that you are already comfortable with the fundamentals of modern personalization for the purposes of this article. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic tasks in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently start from the same place.

Common scenarios for starting a personalisation task:

Your business or client made a purchase to support personalization of a content management system ( CMS ), marketing automation platform ( MAP ), or other related technology.
The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified customisation as a target
Consumer data is unclear or disjointed.
You are running some secluded targeting strategies or A/B tests
On personalization strategy, participants disagree.
Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

Regardless of where you begin, a powerful personalization system will require the same key creating stones. These are the “levels” on the tower, as we’ve made them. Whether you are a UX artist, scholar, or planner, understanding the core components may help make your contribution effective.

From top to bottom, the rates include:

Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
Touchpoints: Where will you get a customized experience?
Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
What makes up a distinct, useable market according to consumer segments?
Actionable information: What dependable and credible information is captured by our professional platform to generate personalization?
What wider set of data is conceivable ( now in our environment ) to allow you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts in change. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them helpful in customisation brainstorming periods, and will include cases for you here.

Starting 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 defines the (one ) overall mission of the personalization program. What do you hope to accomplish? North Stars cast a ghost. The darkness is bigger the sun the bigger the sun. Example of North Starts may incorporate:

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

Northwest card games. These may help steer your team towards a common goal that personalization will help reach, Moreover, these are important for characterizing the end-state ambition of the reportedly stated personalization effort.

Goals

Personalization can help speed up designing with user intentions, as in any great UX design. Goals are the military and tangible metrics that may prove the entire program is effective. Start with your existing analytics and measurement system, as well as metrics that you can benchmark against. In some cases, fresh targets may be ideal. The most important thing to remember is that personalisation is more of a means of achieving an objective than a desired result. Common targets include:

Conversion
Time spent on work
Net promoter score ( NPS)
Satisfaction of the customers

Focus accounts. Examples of concrete and measurable customisation KPIs that are popular.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where the personalisation happens. One of your main responsibilities as a UX artist will be in this area. The connections available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology features are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a person’s experience at a certain point in the trip. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ), but they can also be more specific ( web banner, web pop-up, etc. ). Here are a few illustrations:

Touchpoints at the channel level

Email: Role
Email opens at what time?
In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
Native app
Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

Web overlay
Web alert bar
Web banner
Web content block
Web home page

Touchpoint cards. Examples of typical personalization touchpoints, which can range from simple ( such as email ) to complex ( such as in-store ).

If you’re designing for web interfaces, for example, you will likely need to include personalized “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next step, context, and campaigns, the content for these can be presented programmatically in touchpoints.

Targeted Zones: Examples from Kibo of personalized “zones” on page-level wireframes occurring at various stages of a user journey ( Engagement phase at left and Purchase phase at right. )

Source: Kibo’s” Essential Guide to End-to-End Personaliztion.”

Contexts and Campaigns

Once you’ve identified some touchpoints, you can decide what kind of personalized content a user will receive. 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 programmatically to specific user segments at specific touchpoints, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to consider two separate models: a context model and a content model. The context helps you consider the user’s level of engagement at the personalization moment, such as when they are casually browsing information or deep-dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. 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

Content model for personalization

Alert
Make Easier
Cross-Sell
Enrich

We’ve written a lot more in depth about each of these models elsewhere, so be sure to check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

Campaign and Context cards: This level of the pyramid can help your team focus around the types of personalization to deliver end users and the use-cases in which they will experience it.

User Groups

User segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively, based on user research ( e. g. via rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or via A/B testing ). You will need to think about how to treat the unidentified or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or an equivalent post-cookie identifier ), or the logged-in visitor who is authenticated. Here are some examples from the personalization pyramid:

Unknown
Guest
Authenticated
Default
Referred
Role
Cohort
Unique ID

Segment cards. Examples of typical personalization segments: at the very least, you should take into account the user types logged in, guest, and anonymous. Segmentation can get dramatically more complex from there.

Actionable information

Every organization with any digital presence has data. It’s important to inquire about how to use the data you can ethically collect on users, its inherent reliability and value, and what is the term for “data activation.” Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.

First-party data has a number of benefits for the user experience, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. So a key part of your UX strategy should be to determine what the best form of data collection is on your audiences. Here are a few illustrations:

There is a progression of profiling when it comes to recognizing and making decisioning about different audiences and their signals. As time and confidence and data volume increase, it varies to more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users.

While some combination of implicit / explicit data is generally a prerequisite for any implementation ( more commonly referred to as first party and third-party data ) ML efforts are typically not cost-effective directly out of the box. This is because optimization requires a strong data backbone and content repository. But these approaches should be considered as part of the larger roadmap and may indeed help accelerate the organization’s overall progress. At this point, you will typically work with key stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes defining approach to configuring profiles, profile keys, profile cards and pattern cards. a scalable, multi-faceted approach to profiling.

Pulling it Together

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

In assembling a card “hand”, one can begin to trace the entire trajectory from leadership focus down through 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, what is important to note is that each colored class of card is helpful to survey in understanding the range of choices potentially at your disposal, it is threading through and making concrete decisions about for whom this decisioning will be made: where, when, and how.

Lay Down Your Cards

Near, medium, and long-term goals must be taken into account in any sustainable personalization strategy. Even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there, there is simply no “easy button” wherein a personalization program can be stood up and immediately view meaningful results. Having said that, every personalization activity has a common grammar, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.