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 expert 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 begin. 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? A human-centered personalization program can be established using the Personalization Pyramid, which covers files, classification, content delivery, and overall objectives. 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

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 projects in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently begin with similar starting points.

Common scenarios for starting a personalisation task:

Your business or client made a purchase to support personalization with a 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 unclear or disjointed.
You are running some secluded targeting strategies or A/B tests
On the personalisation approach, parties of contention
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 building 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 personal service?
Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
What makes up a distinct, useable market according to user segments?
Actionable Data: 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 turn. An associated deck of cards was created to demonstrate specific examples from each level to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them helpful in customisation pondering periods, and will include cases for you here.

Starting at the Top

The tower has the following elements:

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 are your goals, exactly? North Stars cast a ghost. The darkness is bigger the sun the bigger the sun. Example of North Starts may incorporate:

Feature: Self-contained personalisation component. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
Experience: Individualized customer experiences across a variety of interactions and customer 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 distinctive, personalized solution experiences. Example: Standalone, branded experience with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Northern 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 aid in accelerating 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. A good place to begin is with your existing analytics and calculation software and metrics you can standard against. In some cases, new targets may be suitable. The most important thing to consider is that personalisation is more of a means of achieving an objective than a desired result. Popular 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. This will be one of your biggest areas of responsibility as a UX custom. 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 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, contexts, 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 level of user engagement at the personalization moment, for instance, if they are just casually browsing information rather than engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. The content model can then guide you in deciding what kind of personalization to use in 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
Make Easier
Cross-Sell
Enrich

We’ve written a lot about each of these models elsewhere, so if you’d like to read more, 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 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. 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 Data

Every organization with any digital presence has data. 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 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 content repository and data backbone. 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 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.

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

Any effective personalization strategy must take into account near, middle, and long-term objectives. 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, all personalization activities follow the same grammatical convention, just like every sentence contains both nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.