Personalization involves using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals. Applications are personalized based on the characteristics (interests, social category, context, etc) of an individual. (Wiki)
The concept of personalization when introduced took a while, but made a major impact in every industry. Today you find Websites, applications, devices, gadgets personalized. But the question still remains how easy are they to personalize. Today we see personalized dashboards (most common) or ways to configure your application, gadgets and websites to a certain extent which gives a feeling to the end user that yes its 'Personalized' for me.
But how easy it is to personalize? Applications today are personalized but to the extent where the Dashboard shows data that is relevant to you, allows to change shortcuts that is accepted by you, but what about personalizing the application to show data how and what you prefer easily?
Consider a scenario: Bruce (CEO) and Amanda (Sr. Manager) work for a retail company that deals in tools in Wisconsin Madison. Bruce started the company way back in 1985 with retail chains in 6 different states in the US. Later in 1996 he realized the power of the internet and started selling tools on ebay. Later in 2000, Bruce decided to go completely online with only one retail store in Madison. Amanda an MBA works closely with Bruce on maintaining the inventory to ensure they never run out of stock. Both of them have the same task - inventory forecasting and to do this they need multiple reports. So you build an application that gives them multiple reports in various formats - grids, graphs, pie charts and trend lines.
It looks simple when you build the application keeping Bruce and Amanda in mind since both of them want the same data. But what we miss at times is Bruce wants to look at data in a grid. Since his early years Bruce has been looking at inventory on print outs and excel. He is not comfortable with graphs and on the other hand, Amanda analyzes data based on graphs, she looks at bar graphs and trend lines extensively and for further details she takes a look at the data in the grid. So the application meets the requirements of both but both have to make an effort to get their data in respective formats on their screens.
This is where you would want to personalize. Allowing Bruce and Amanda to set their default views the very first time they access a report would be ideal. The moment they save their settings for a report they always open in the same view, with other options at low priority but still accessible.
It’s irritating rather confusing to show a list of massive settings and ask the user to personalize them even without showing them what the impact is.
