Adaptive Personalization - Summary
Introduction
Adaptive interfaces and content displays employ various methods of tracking either an individual user’s behavior, or a group’s behavior and tailoring the navigation and content to suit users in different contexts. The assumption is that users can have a more productive and satisfying experience if the information available to them is personalized to make it as relevant as possible. A variety of adaptive technologies and approaches have been tried in both research environments and commercial mobile deployments. We examine these techniques and the tradeoffs involved in utilizing each for enhancing the mobile user experience.
Opportunities
Providing access to a vast amount of Internet information holds great promise for mobile users and mobile business operators. Industry experts believe individual personalization will be important in order for Internet access to be widely adopted by mobile users. A number of techniques for personalizing information access and content display offer potentially relevant customization capabilities. Which personalization approaches hold the most promise for a great mobile Internet user experience?
Challenges
- Personalization technologies can be resource intensive and significantly impact system performance. The most efficient technologies do not necessarily bring the greatest value to the end user.
- Technologies and user profile data span across different parts and players in the mobile ecosystem, making it difficult to deliver a unified experience for all information access via the mobile device.
- Mobile operators and end users have different and sometime conflicting goals for personalization (monetization vs. usefulness).
- There are limits to the level of personalization that users will tolerate before feeling a loss of control or violation of privacy.
Future Research Areas
How much personalization do users want and need? Is there is a threshold of personalization beyond which there is diminishing value to the user and the mobile operator? Are there unifying technical frameworks that will allow the customization to occur consistently across different mobile web sites, portals, and applications?