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. Although there is still a lot of advertising hype surrounding personalization programs, 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 platform tailored to 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 elements 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 jobs 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 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 disjointed or confusing
You are conducting some sporadic targeting strategies or A/B tests.
On the personalisation method, stakeholders disagree.
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 rates 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 Segments: What constitutes a special, suitable market?
What trustworthy and credible information does our professional platform collect to enable 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 levels sequentially. An accompanying deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more actionable. We’ve included examples for you here because we think they’re useful for personalization brainstorming sessions.

Starting at the top

The components of the pyramid are as follows:

North Star

With your personalization program, whether large or small, you aim for a general north star. The North Star identifies the (one ) overall goal of the personalization program. What do you wish to accomplish? North Stars cast a shadow. The bigger the star, the bigger the shadow. Example of North Starts might include:

Feature: Self-contained personalization componentry. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
Experience: Personalized user experiences across multiple interactions and user flows. Examples: Email campaigns, landing pages, advanced messaging ( i. e. C2C chat ) or conversational interfaces, larger user flows and content-intensive optimizations ( localization ).
Product: Highly differentiating personalized product experiences. Examples: Standalone, branded experiences with personalization at their core, like the “algotorial” playlists by Spotify such as Discover Weekly.

North star cards. These can assist in guiding your team toward a common objective that personalization will support. They also can help describe the overall goal of the team’s current personalization effort.

Goals

As in any good UX design, personalization can help accelerate designing with customer intentions. The goals serve as the tactical and measurable indicators of the success of the entire program. A good place to begin is with your current analytics and measurement program and metrics you can benchmark against. In some cases, new goals may be appropriate. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalization is not a desired outcome. Common goals include:

Conversion
Time on task
Net promoter score ( NPS)
Customer satisfaction

Goal cards. Examples of some frequently used and quantifiable personalization KPIs.

Touchpoints

Personalization takes place at touchpoints. As a UX designer, this will be one of your largest areas of responsibility. The touchpoints you have will depend on how your personalization and the associated technology are configured, and they should be based on enhancing a user’s experience 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: Time of open
In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
Native app
Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

Web overlay
Web alert bar
Web banner
Web content block
Web menu

Touchpoint cards. Examples of common personalization touchpoints: these can vary from narrow ( e. g., email ) to broad ( e. g., 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 of Kibo personalized “zones” on page-level wireframes that occur at various stages of the user journey ( the engagement phase is at right and the purchase phase is at right ).

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

Contexts and Campaigns

Once you’ve outlined some touchpoints, you can consider the actual 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 whether a user is engaging with the personalization process at the moment, such as when they are simply browsing the web or engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in terms of behaviors for information retrieval. 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 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 assist your team in focusing on the uses for end-users and the types of personalization they can expect.

User Segments

Based on user research, user segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively ( for example, using rules and logic tied to user behavior, or through A/B testing ). You will need to consider 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 at the least. Here are a few illustrations from the personalization pyramid:

Unknown
Guest
Authenticated
Default
Referred
Role
Cohort
Unique ID

Segment cards. Examples of common personalization segments: at a minimum, you will need to consider the anonymous, guest, and logged in user types. From there, segmentation can become significantly more complex.

Actionable Data

Every business with a digital presence has information. It’s important to inquire about how to use the data you can ethically collect on users, its inherent reliability and value, and how to 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 represents multiple advantages on the UX front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. 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 user numbers increase in terms of time, confidence, and data volume, it varies more granularly.

Although some form of implicit or 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 content repository and data backbone. 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 important stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes a defined process 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 is also at the heart of the way that both co-authors have organized workshops to build a backlog of programs, which would make a good subject for a separate article.

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.