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Personalizing Content

By Jonathan Price

Jonathan Price is the co-author of How to Communicate Technical Information and the new Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. He spoke at our chapter meeting, on October 4^th, about Personalizing Content. He can be contacted at jprice@swcp.com or through his website theprices.com.

Imagine an audience of one person. As technical communicators, we are moving beyond books and help systems aimed at a great muddled mass of people, beyond a collection of niche audiences, micromarkets, subgroups, and demographic clusters. We may soon be communicating with one person at a time.

The Internet is changing everything, including people's expectations for technical communication. Emerging technologies now offer two remarkable transformations in the delivery of information: Customization (what is delivered) and Personalization (how it is delivered).

Worthy of reflection

The Reflect.com website, a startup funded by Procter & Gamble Company, shows how personalization can work. Reflect.com acts as a display case for a factory manufacturing one-of-a-kind cosmetics, but it suggests what personalization can do for our own users.

The process on the site produces a personally designed cosmetic for each individual user, labeled with her own name, and even delivered in a packaging of her choosing. The site remembers what was created for the user on previous visits and questions her about her level of satisfaction with the cosmetic, developing a ìpersonalî relationship with the customer.

How do they do that?

As people become accustomed to these rich, interactive experiences at e-commerce sites, many folks will begin demanding similar personalization from technical communication.

• Personalization provides for conversation; it builds a relationship.
• Personalization makes the information easier to use and saves users time.
• Personalization gives people reason not to switch products and increases client loyalty.
• Personalization permits the individual to make choices.

To provide a one-person-at-a-time experience of information, we turn to object-oriented content management software that permits users to pick and choose content on the fly.

Profiling

Personalization begins when a visitor fills out a registration form, from which the site builds a personal profile, which the software can use to come up with relevant, updated content.

For example, the carpoint.com site asks you which car you own and then responds with information about your particular car, possible problems, and times for your next service. In other words, the site responds with relevant information that is meaningful to the particular user.

This kind of content-heavy interactivity goes beyond marketing tricks, because the information is genuinely useful to the user. Highly interactive sites permit users to manage content in a number of ways, such as:

• pick a content version
• add or remove content to their own pages
• move content around--moving most important to the top, less important to the bottom
• arrange the layout with their new content
• pick and choose from standard content

Moving into the future

Our ideas about our audiences, our work, and our own role as writers--these are all beginning to change. Customers experience personalization out on the Web, and expect the same level of direct interaction from our information. Instead of being authors who publish books or help systems to a grateful mass audience, we are beginning to become helpful peers who participate in a series of conversations with individuals, some of whom know more than we do, and who demand that we address new topics, answer new questions, and talk in our own voice.

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The Devil Mountain Views -- Nov/Dec 2001
(ebstc.org/newsletter/front.html)
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