 Right. We might as well start. Hi everyone. My name is Andre Kakos and today I'm going to walk you through a personalization UX playbook. It's one way. This is my way of how to handle or prepare for personalization on the web. A little bit about me. I'm a digital experience lead at Morved. I work with lots of human-centered design methodologies. Of course, what is a UX person without these methodologies? For about more than 15 years, I've had to cut down on those years because I don't look so old. Working for a range of national and international brands, both within digital agencies, whether the boutique is small or within larger global groups. This is, I'm going to show you my home. This is where I live. I live in that little deserted island in the middle there where user experience sits. I get lapped by the winds and tsunamis of requests coming from four corners of the earth. That's what the business imperatives are and what the business needs. I've got to weigh them up against what the user on the opposite side wants and also work out how to deliver that within the right technology. Also, while making sure that you're delivering something that is beautiful in the end. The technology as well as it's feasible, business is what's viable and the people is what's desirable. Then, of course, bring it all together and make it look all beautiful. That's the framework of everything I do and work so that I know how to deliver on the work successfully. This presentation is for these types of people. If you're not one of them, you know where the exit door is. Everybody's welcome. Let's start with personalization, what it means. It's about tailoring the content of your site for visitors so that you can match some criteria such as their preference or the stage of their journey and their context. We measure context or determine it by looking at some browsing history, the device they're on, the time of the day, the season, the location and the tasks they're about to carry out. There's more, of course, than that. A simple type of personalization, and sorry if I'm doing a little plug for our website there, is something like this. We know you've been here before so we've personalized that to say, hey, we're now friends. Something that's a bit more complex than that looks at this promo here because we know that you've read something on the weekly drop before getting to our website. Why do we need to worry about personalization? So I've got to give you some stats. This is based on a survey conducted by McKinsey Group looking at consumer behavior as it relates to personalization. You'll see that from that survey that they've done, they found that 71% of consumers expect personalization. 76% get frustrated if they don't get it. We can all blame this on the big digital companies out there such as Amazon who've been leading the way early on with personalization, with simple things as here's something we recommend for you because we've seen you do look at certain things on our site. We're not just Amazon, of course, all of the streaming services for entertainment like Netflix and so on, and not to forget all of the social media platforms. So we live in a personalized world, and don't forget even frigging TikTok, right? There's all these personalization algorithms that are pulling out information that you expected to see or would like to see. So the consumer or the user is expecting personalization. It will get a bit frustrated without it. Looking at a purchase intent, and this might not be applied to everybody in the room or the organization you work with, but at least it shows you that if someone engages, 70% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company if there is personalization on that site. 78% are more likely to repurchase or do a repeat purchase, and then 78% are more likely to recommend that brand. So you can also look at this also from how if your site is not selling something, but if there's providing a service, that stuff also applies. The whole thing is not the personalization, it's not just a technical problem. You can buy a product off the shelf and off you go, it does it for you. It's really about solving a business problem and a marketing problem. And when you've done that, what you'll get to benefit from is an engaged customer or engaged user. You start to have a two-way conversation with them. You nurture them, become a lead in the commercial terms, and then you convert them over to your cause, and you can retain them as a loyal customer. And that's when you develop some brand affinity with your brand there, and they're prepared to do some social sharing. So we saw that figure before of 78% more likely to recommend. And what does all that boil down to? Higher revenue. So where do we start? You ask a UX person, you get a UX answer, human-centered design. Step one, I'm preparing a few steps here just to help you because this is essentially a playbook, right? You identify your audience groups. If you haven't done that, you're in trouble already. You segment them according to what experience they have, what type of industry, and you can go crazy with all that segmentation. And then define each group's informational needs, their pain points, and their top tasks, and things like that. There's a few tools that I used to help me with that process. One of them is this one. It's an empathy map. I'm sure you've seen varieties of this map floating around the web, but this is an example I found on game-storming. And one thing I know is when I try to use this map with organizations that I service and allowing them to do it by themselves, they'll know you'll see the pain on their faces because they're trying to think from the perspective of their user, their customer. What are they feeling? What are they thinking? What are their motivations? What do they hear from their peers about a certain problem? And what do they see and say? And more importantly, we're having to focus on things like their motivations, their pains, and their pain points. This is one way of doing it. There's also a lot of other tools. But this starts the conversation, and if you find it really hard doing that on your own, come talk to me. I'll help you out. Then I find that it's really useful to apply this marketing funnel approach. It also depends on the type of site that you're running, especially if you're trying to convert someone to take on a service. And this is a simplified marketing funnel where someone's aware of the brand or the service that you're providing. They're coming in at that top level of awareness, and that's what we call a prospect in terms of a commercial product. The more they interact with your site, this is the next stage of their journey, they become a lead because they're now evaluating what you can do. They're no longer just passing by, and then as they spend more time with your brand, they might be converted to adopting or taking on a service that you're providing, so they become a customer. I've done this with a client of ours at the Department of Defense where I've mapped out the journey in a completely entirely different way. So this is for the lovely people in the Army who prepare and train officers in more games. So their journey in consuming information on the site that we've built is completely different. So I've used a customer journey mapping approach to map out all the tasks or the steps that go to achieve the creation of a training package. So we mapped them out altogether in a focus group setting, worked out what they're doing, but I took them through the empathy map first and to understand who they are and what they need before getting to this here. And this is an important one because it takes time and effort because you really want to analyze the things like what actions and tasks you're trying to achieve at that particular stage, and then what need you're trying to satisfy at that particular stage, and then what touch point, what tools or systems you need to interact with while you're seeking that information and the pain points and frustrations you face there. And it's always good to gauge their frustration or their sentiment. Am I happy to do this? Am I okay with it? Am I just neutral? Because that also gives you another nuance of how to interpret their frustration or their motivation to get through these things. And you can always ask them about the opportunities. How can we fix this? If you have a frustration with this particular step, what do you think is the solution? And that's been a very useful tool for me to analyze all of that because then I can distill all the tasks they need to perform at each one of those stages. Next what I do is define some dimensions. This is the stage where you should be investigating the tools, what personalization engine you prepare to use. And now you've defined some of the customer needs and the stages and the information about the customer. It will help you also select your personalization engine. So instead of going buying some expensive thing off the shelf and then realizing all I want to do is some simple personalization, do it the other way around. Find out how complex your personalization needs are and then work out what tool to use. Some of the dimensions we can program around personalizations are things like we talked about this before, geolocation, the time of day and season, what type of audience you are and the type of topics that you're interested in, the stage or the step in your journey and the goal you're trying to achieve. We can get a bit more complicated with tracking or building towards your intent by tracking a link that you've come through from an external bit of advertising or a newsletter and then show you a bit of information related to that on the site. So step one and this is step two, define your dimensions and then you go defining your content. Well, I started like that on a board with it's inscribbles. It looks better like this. And also this is a simplified version. So if I can try to build this out compared to the journey map that I did for the Department of Defense, it will be a lot bigger than this. So this is only a recommended way of doing it of course. So you work at your stage. We talked about the marketing funnel of awareness, the valuation and conversion and work out the tasks that we've identified. Through the journey mapping and also the empathy map, what those tasks are for each stage. And you can see there's A1s and E1s and C1s. And also what goal you're supporting at that stage so that you can push that user forward. And also you can deliver some relevant material as way of extra supporting information along the way. I will show you what all this means in a second. Now that's that important step. Whatever UX designer wants to do is just design a page and put some stuff on it and get some content in. I will show you, so the whole thing is, I know this screenshot is showing you some homepage, but it's, we've got to think about it of course outside of just the homepage because a lot of personalization presentations I've been to and things I've read to show you all these examples of here's the homepage and this is how we personalize it. And the previous examples on the Mort website were just on the homepage. But no, work out the priority pages your customer lands on most. And then start there because that's where they see you. Maybe they've come in through SEO or some other means and found that particular page that they're most interested in. And then you go and define the content placement and the role that each piece of content plays on that. So I'm going to show you just a close up what that looks like. Here it is. So I marked this up real quick. So maybe you would start here a space if you're personalizing the homepage with a stage message. Something that says that we know you've been here before or we know that you're a loyal customer. You've been multiple times and they're all about some rules that we can build into the system to understand based on your browser history and how many times you visited that you are either a first time visitor or a loyal customer and so on. And we can promote a message at the top there just to recognize, to tell the person that we know something about you and we're tailoring this message to you. Now we don't have to get creepy about it, so that's the other thing. And as we saw before in that table with the customer journey mapping, we're plotting out some tasks. And there are an approximation of all the tasks that we have collected and known that a customer might want to perform within that particular stage they're in, whether they're in awareness or they're evaluating or they're about to convert. And this is where that goal promotion box could sit so that if they see and have these are some of the tasks they've done, this might be the next natural progression for them to, and that's why I placed the call to action button. So do this thing next to help them along the journey. And the supporting information, and this could be something like a blog post or a news article that is relevant to them or maybe even a podcast that helps them understand the things that they're preparing for. So if you are, for instance, trying to sign someone up to become a member for a service that you're doing, this will be ideal supporting information as to what you could do as a member to put it there. Some of the tasks are to look at your eligibility to become a member, what happens after you sign up and that sort of stuff before you do that goal promo to sign up here because you're now ready to become a member. Is this sounding all right? Next step is to analyze. So this is a dashboard that we did in Google Data Studio. It's one of those experiments that we've done and this is showing you, we're calculating things like and tracking things, the different topics that get used most across the site because we're now tracking all that information. Which audiences are interacting most with your content in that time frame that we're looking at? What stage are those users are in so that you know what is the most important stage and how many of your customers are in which stage in their journey? There are other things that we can pull out there but I'm just giving you an idea and it's always important to track these because it's really a learning experience so that you know that all of that work that you've done in preparing all that personalization is it working or not? So what do we do after analyzing? We always have to adopt an experimental mindset and go back to after you analyze, go back and check what you've done in Discovery to make sure are the tasks correct? Have I misinterpreted things and go back into defining more dimensions if you wanted to and then defining the content that sets that up and number four you design and build your pages again and then go back into analyzing and keep going through that tumbling circle until you get it right. Of course don't go crazy and build that for five different audience groups. Start with one. Start with a priority one that's going to get you the best results that will alleviate some pain. Imagine if a particular type of customer is the one that hits up the call center most and is generating all these support requests all the time. Start with that and then work your way down the list and see how that improves that experience. And then where does that all fit in? Now that you've done that, who owns the personalization experience? And that's why we're putting up content ops. We've all heard of DevOps and design ops. But then there's a trending term there for content ops as people who manage the content process and tools and systems. So you've got to work out who owns personalization. You can't expect everybody to own it. How do you embed it into the current systems and processes of your content development in your organization? And what's the impact on that content lifecycle? Who's going to? Because the content ops department or the person that owns it needs to manage that lifecycle of that content to keep it fresh and relevant. And most importantly, what tools do you use to manage that content? Famous people? Famous quotes? Well, you didn't quite say that himself. I'm going to take it off before I get sued for fraud. Here's some other interesting quotes as to why personalization is good. Right, questions. I know I've re-sued through this really quickly, but I've covered lots of ground, so I'm hoping for lots of questions. Yeah. The morphed convivial module, that's a personalization. Can you please repeat the question as well? The morphed convivial module? Yeah. Is that a personalization? Yeah. Now, we've got a separate capability for a personalization. It's called personified. It's a separate product that we've built that helps track the users in information and context and preferences and be able to capture that in local storage. So it's anonymous personalization. So we're not going into the creepy area of, we know what type of socks you wear and that sort of stuff. The question is, when you personalize content on the site, is it important to help people that it's personalized? Based on our experience with how you interact with social media and Amazon and so on, it doesn't tell you other than recommended for you or you might like this in a gentle way because otherwise, I was thinking about that actually this morning is whether it's important to phrase something. You're seeing this because you like so and so. There are sites that do this. But there are also, I think there's some resistance from people who feel like privacy is being invaded. It creeps them out. So I think my approach would be to keep it subliminal, gentle because especially the approach we're taking is that it's all anonymous anyway and we're presenting information that's going to grab your attention because you're gravitating towards that content. So maybe language-like, you may like this or this is of interest to you. Yeah, it's gentle enough to push them along the way. And as part of that experimentation also is if you have a panel of customers you can always tap into and an interview after you've released some of that stuff to see how they take on your personalization effort, work out if they like that approach or not because you can't just give advice that could work across all sorts of industries for all types of audiences. So experimenting, trying that out would be best and having that access to getting feedback directly from the user would be best.