After months of planning, you touch down at your dream destination. You’ve had a great flight, you’ve arrived on time and the weather is just perfect. Feeling slightly smug that your bags turned up first on the carousel, you sail through immigration and are almost ready to start your vacation. However, leaving the arrivals hall, do you ever wish that you were one of those people who has a driver waiting for you holding a placard with your name on it, ready to whisk you away from the airport melee? Or, would you rather ‘go native’ and jump immediately into a packed minibus to soak up the local culture for less than half the price of a coffee back home?
Being treated as an individual or ‘going with the flow’ is often a question of hard cash and the ability/preference to pay for a more tailored experience but should this always be the case and should this equally be applied to the online world? If a truly user-centred approach were adopted, this inequality could be designed away by increasing choice, giving control back to the user should they wish to exercise this and providing greater emphasis on information to help their particular needs (or de-emphasise information of lesser importance/relevance).
Personalisation and customisation are often debated when designing a site for different user groups. Currently, we have been working on an intranet site for a global energy provider, catering for a wide range of users from admin staff at head office, through to well engineers in Kazakhstan and geologists in Trinidad. The intranet is seen as a key way of connecting disparate groups to help share knowledge and keep updated on company activities, but satisfying distinctly different cultural and professional groups is a real design challenge. Customisation is being explored as a way to increase user efficiency and deliver content that is most relevant to them based on their team or physical location, whereas personalisation gives users control over information priorities on the site to align these to which activities they currently perform.
Aviva in their recent global rebrand from Norwich Union emphasised customisation in their series of TV ads interspersed with celeb and non-celeb types stating how they wish to be treated as a customer - “remember me”, “don’t call me by my‘stage’ name”. The rise of “I am not a customer reference number” is potentially a backlash against larger organisations who have grown considerably over the years whilst seeking to reduce their cost base through streamlining their back office processes to create greater efficiencies might have forgotten that people may want to be treated as an individual.
Another example is that of Virgin Trains recent campaign who transformed the journey of Mr Typical Businessman from a simple commute into a highly personal train travel experience where every customer touch point was an opportunity to emphasise support and encouragement transforming him into Mr Successful Businessman. Thus there is an opportunity for those organisations willing to be flexible to speak with multiple voices or provide a range of tailored services to a range of consumers whilst still maintaining the same consistent brand.
A much earlier example of personalisation was the revolutionary (well, I was 7 at the time!) concept of Salt n Shake crisps. I remember being amazed about and thefact that I actually had, within my control, the power to personalise the amount of salt in a crisp packet or even have none at all. Come to think about it, those Muller corner people have been doing this for a while too – to mix or not to mix –dilemmas!!!
However, all this needs to be caveated by the old adage ‘what users say they will do is not necessarily what they WILL do’, or simply ‘you can have too much of a good thing’. There are countless examples of projects that have gone overbudget by trying to please everyone’s requirements, reversing the 80/20 rule and implementing a complex, overdeveloped degree of customisation widgets that few bother to use and actually distracts users from their actual tasks, or worse still, displaying highly personalised information that restricts access to explore the wider picture of a site.
Back to the airport and I would still probably take the minibus option, but coming home to a rain soaked early morning Heathrow red eye arrival I would probably reconsider. Taxi!