How UX Design Drives Personalization
A Deep Dive
80% of customers say they are more likely to commit to a purchase from brands offering personalized experiences (Epilson). 42% say non-personalized experiences act as a deterrent (Adobe).
The more you look into the numbers, the clearer it becomes that personalization is integral to appeal to modern- day customers. Why so? Because good personalization reflects a strong understanding of customers, and also lets them know that they are the brand’s top priority. It earns trust and drives loyalty.
UX Design in Personalization: How Does it Fit?
The relationship between UX design and personalization is an organic one. But before we get there, lets clearly define personalization. As the word suggests, personalization is a process that enables brands to build unique customer journeys based on specific customer requirements and preferences. It is the process of ‘personalizing’ the customer journey.
And this is where UX becomes absolutely integral. While analytics and customer data give businesses an understanding of what customers want, UX enables brands to implement these insights. It allows them to tailor their web resources, and leverage the UX design process to fit individual requirements and preferences.
How UX Can be Used to Drive Personalization
UX can drive personalization at two basic levels: at the individual level (depending on purchase or browse history, search etc.) or at a group level (with segmentation based on location or other similar parameters). Here’s a breakdown of the different types of personalization experiences driven by UX.
1. Personalization for Individuals:
Triggers such as past purchases, specific searches on the website etc. can be used to offer individual-level personalization. At this level, the system will create an individual UX for every user, and this will differ from one user to the next. The challenge here: is it possible to manually create a UX for every existing user. Shor answer: No. This is where machine-learning-based AI applications can be trained to create these UX modules on the fly for every new user. It is a lot of a work, but if this is a specific business requirement, it’s well worth the effort.
2. Personalization by Location:
Every major brand across the globe follows this. A unique experience designed for location specific audiences reflects cultural awareness, and also, of course, makes it easier to appeal to these audiences. A very simple example, having a Japanese brand ambassador pop up for a cola company’s website in Japan – great idea; using the same website for an American audience – not so much.
3. Personalization Based on Role:
This approach requires a mix of pre-emptive design, and real-time implementation. When the user logs in to the website, it collects basic data (usually by the means of a few basic questions) and subsequently presents personalized pages based on these choices. This helps cut the clutter from the user’s point of view, and enables brands to provide more specific, targeted information built on a personalized skeleton.
4. Personalization Based on Time/Season:
More specific to food-related brands, this design enables brands to display different content at different times of the day. For example, having customized breakfast, lunch, snack or dinner landing pages appear at different times of the day. The same type of time-specific UX changes can also be triggered for brands that deal primarily with physiological needs.
On a broader timeline, brands also update UX to go with the season or for a variety of promotional activities. Christmas sales, Black Friday sales, discount periods etc. are common examples of UX personalization triggered by periodic events.
5. Cross-selling Personalization & Enhancements:
These UX mechanisms expose users to more products, similar to the ones they are looking at. Systems such as ‘shop-the-look’ allow customers to coordinate their purchase with other corresponding products without them having to navigate away. Similarly, it allows them to look for add-ons, accessories and accompaniments with ease, making the whole experience, not just personalized, but also intuitive.
Similarly, even if customers don’t find exactly what they’re looking for, ‘similar products’ suggestions ensure that they get a look at other products in your range without navigating away. Because hey, search and navigation can fail quite often, and in this situation, UX driven personalization can hold the answer.
The real key when leveraging UX design to drive personalization is intelligence – intelligence about your target customer or segments, and associated variables. You could design the slickest UX, but if it’s based on faulty intelligence, it is still most certainly going to fall flat. Get your data and intelligence right, and you’ll have the perfect launching pad for UX-driven personalization.
