 So this talk is called, this time it's personalized, preparing your site for effective personalization. I'm gonna try to talk fast, I'm sorry about that. But we have a lot of information to get through. So the agenda today is, what is personalization, why should I care, planning for it, sustaining your strategy, implementation options and conclusions, and just really quickly because it's like you're talking to a few unconscious or for image action media, Vancouver, Canada, and I can tell you more about music, you know. Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm a walker, so it's hard for me to... Maybe you can grab this one. Oh yeah, maybe later. Perfect. So first step is, why personalization? Probably not a brand new topic for everybody, but it's important to know. So how to engage users with the urgent needs within a single site, a big challenge for any kind of site, but especially sites like higher education sites, public sector sites, anyone with lots of different types of users. How to improve content discoverability in sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. So how can we push the key content up to users and make them feel like the site is more for them that's tailored to their needs. And also how to accommodate users who may have longer decision cycles. So if someone's coming back six months from now or if someone's coming back three months from now after they need more time to think through a decision, how do we kind of hit them at the right moment? So that's where personalization hopefully comes in. So this is maybe a little bit of an older school example, but this is a standard page right here just to give you an example of what personalization looks like just in case you want a mental picture. So on a standard page, we can magically provide them with a message, it looks like you're coming from China, you may be interested in our programs for international students. But let's raise inversion as we can say, hey, the software's done, here's the programs for international students. And then potentially TMI, hello Tom, we're helping students succeed and try to succeed myself. That's sort of getting to the uncanny valley of creepiness when we're starting to talk to people as if we've broken the fourth wall. But that gives you an idea of some of the things you can do with personalization, many, many things you can do. But the idea is to get more and more engagement. So the potential outcomes are to give your users what they're looking for at the right time in the desired format, improve retention and conversion and increase user satisfaction. So the research on this is really clear. There's tons of surveys, big surveys with 20,000 data points, saying that personalization, people who commit personalization and do it well, see enormous increases in sales and engagement, e-consultancy and did a survey on that HubSpot, looked at 30,000 of their users, did a very broad survey that found 42% of people who personalized calls to action, or sorry, 42% higher conversion rate for people who personalized calls to action. So amazing stuff. So why isn't everyone doing it? How many people are doing it, by the way? Okay, a few people, three, four, that's great. Limited time and budgets, competing priorities, technology barriers, what problems should I use? Not when we restart, how do I implement it? What do I implement? How do I manage success? And how do I sell it to my team and make them feel like spending this money is worth more time? So what I'd like to talk about is not necessarily how to do personalization in depth and drupal. You want to talk about how do you get personalization moving within your organization? How can you plan for it and effectively get started on that initiative? So effective personalization, like anything worth doing requires planning. There are incremental steps we can take that set us up for success. First, the strategy and the perspective we should be right that we can layer in technology. There's a great article in here. This is linked to from the bottom and I can share the slide deck. Where Steven, Steven, you talks about kind of the golden, where? Yeah, the golden basics of personalization. So the key cornerstone to technology, content, analytics and data. But if you start with the technology without the content, the analytics and the data, you'll a lot of time end up spending your wheels and not making the best use of the technology. So I'm talking fast, so I'm losing my moisture quickly as well. So before beginning with the technology, we have to step back and start thinking about what are some ways that we can actually get our users to engage with the site? How can we understand our users? And make sure we have the right content, the right place before we can start the technology. So we need to understand the audience and the context. What are the business needs? Who are the users, what do they want? What key content will help them achieve the goals? And what friction, what sort of anxieties or pain points are holding the back from achieving those goals? So some great activities to help you prepare for personalization are kind of the traditional activities you'd associate with the kind of discovery project or a kind of user engagement project. So identify organizational user goals and not just talking about the goal and being one responsive site, but a little bit deeper. What are some of our key segments? Maybe you have five key segments, maybe you have 20 key segments. What are the value propositions that drive your users and make them feel motivation and attachment to your content? Developing personas, so I think a lot of us probably don't know what these owners are, but I'll show you a couple of examples. So personifying your users, helping to ensure that the site is matching returning users, sort of incoming students, joining students, all that kind of stuff. Mapping user journeys and also gathering user feedback. So the great news is, as you prepare all these things, your personalization can actually adjust this information. Once you develop personas, you can plug what personas into whatever sort of personalization you use and it can actually make use of that to build up much more sophisticated data models and gauge your users much more effectively. So you're not doing anything, this is what you should be doing when you're getting ready for a personalization effort. So the first step is identifying business and user goals. So establishing organization context, identifying overlap between institutional needs, so what we've got is the aid institution and what the users need, identifying the gap there. So who are our users, what benefits can we offer them and I'm probably not being picked up very well by the mic, hello there. And how can we reach them? So in order to get that data moving within the organization, a key activity that we do, a lot of people do sort of onsites, they do a lot of kind of stakeholder engagement activities. We like to get the actual users in the room together. So this is an example of actual users of an actual product thing in a room together talking about what are the sort of key things that they need from the product and how do they use it and what's the context of the use, all that kind of stuff. Super amazing, great data, everybody gets excited, tons of opportunities for buy-in and enlightenment. Enlightenment always ensues, which is always great when you can guarantee epiphany in an activity. So these are some of the outcomes from an activity like this. All the personas that are sort of the key personas for the product or the site, their priority, which ones are most important. And then value propositions, what do users actually respond to, what messages make them feel like they want to move forward, what messages leave them cold. Pretty powerful stuff. The second part is identifying and developing user personas. So how many people here have personas on your site? Okay, about third, okay, that's pretty good. So the important part of developing user personas is just basing them in some sort of research or data, not just coming up with them from your head, which can be a great starting point, but establishing who are the key audience sites that want to connect to the site. And you want to connect with them. What are their goals and motivations and what makes them sort of stay up at night? What are they anxious about? Is it the price of your product? Is it the difficulty of choosing among many different options, all those different things. So this is another example of an onsite we've done with these are all real users, not actors who play users within a workshop. Developing user journeys and personas together collaboratively, super, super amazing activity. And out of that, we get things like this. So we get these great personas. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try. We get these great personas that are actually based on some sort of actual analysis data talking to users. We know we have a little more confidence that these are the actual, the right information, which then we can sort of have our personalization engine consume this really sort of great segmentation data. The third part is mapping user journeys. So for each individual persona, whether it's a prospective student or a new customer, whatever it might be, identifying pathways to achieving their goals. How will they get there? What's it getting in the way? What content will they need to be created in order to support this journey? So again, this is something we really like to do with users as well, like to get them in a room together, whenever possible, or if not possible, you get stakeholders together and look at your analytics and I'll tell you two ways you can do that. Mapping out the personas, user journeys. How do they get to your site? What do they want to know when they get there? And not just mapping out, not just mapping out the actual path they're taking, but also what's the key content? What do we need them to see at what order in that journey? And that really helps us understand how we personalize this site. So we identify that some magic is in the blue area. Identifying the opportunity. What will get them to keep going? What will get them to keep moving in the journey? And finally, gathering user feedback. Sounds easy, it's not so hard. Validating hypotheses we've generated, identifying issues with the current site. What is blocking users right now? Is our proposed direction correct? Is this the right design, the right content? So this is a great slide. From a group called UX guys in Toronto. Anyone heard of those? They're cool. I think they still exist. This is basically a quadrant. Oh, it's like docking so fast. I can't even keep hydrated. So this is a quadrant that basically, so with all the different usability activities you can engage in, this is fantastic stuff. And how you can try and do it, different techniques from different quadrants to achieve a much more holistic, triangulated data picture. It's been passive. So within our project, we usually try to engage four or five of these items. We try to choose from different projects so that we can get a really convincing package of data. So this is just vital stuff. There's all kinds of different types of things you can do within this picture. But I strongly encourage you to check this out and think about what are some ways that you could combine these data sources, not just using Google Analytics, but actually getting outside of that. Whether it's unmoderated testing or focus groups, whatever you wanna do, lots of different possibilities. And the link is in the bottom of the slide there. So out of all of this effort, and sort of very kind of traditional sort of UX activity, hopefully the outcomes are, you understand what users value and what they don't. What does the sequence and priority they want to receive information and content in? How do they want to receive information, video, chart, testimonial, so on? And how do we get our team to buy in? Our colleagues, our bosses, our sponsors, showing this data, showing this, even getting them into the workshop will make a huge difference to getting them on board and excited. We see that time and time and time again. Right, so you collect all this information, you're preparing your site, you're gathering all this great data about your users, thinking about how you want to architect your content, so how do you actually implement personalization? Well, once you've thought about the content, the data and the analytics, personas, sort of raw data that you've collected and the content you're developing, the fourth part is obviously you need something somewhere to put it. So in order to get ready for automation, you need the right platform. So with a framework of content, meaningful data, and at least we can now start layering in technology. A couple of use cases, for example, I assume a user from China, we might want to show them international program information, but we might want to also emphasize academic reputation because that's very important. Generally for students from Asia, reputation is a key driver in a value proposition. We might also want to emphasize safety. Visitor to a nursing program, we might want to display testimonials featuring a nursing student on the about page rather than a generic about page. So there's lots of things that can do that. Some of them are easy, some of them are harder. Some of the options in Drupal include Aquialift, so that's available for Drupal 8, which is a very robust product. There's also contributed modules. Some of the challenges, some of the contributed modules, and you may have noticed some in Drupal 8, but right now personalization and personalization are D7, only I believe. So that might be, if that's not correct, let me know. And also custom solutions, which we've done a number of times where we've tied together geolocation data, taxonomy to kind of pull together, sort of help users self-identify and drive them to custom pathways based on that data. So those are Drupal options. They're also great, best-of-breed products, like Evergauge, it's a fantastic product out there. So a lot of times, it could be the case that the best option for you is the third party option. That does everything you need to really, really well. So Lyft is out there, Evergauge, as well as Qubit, there's many others out there. But check them out, there's some fantastic tools that will kind of take in all this research and data that you've collected and actually allow you to automate it in a sort of powerful way. So here's an example of a Qubit screen. So it might be hard to read this, but it says new customer and non-farm users. So that's one of your personas. It's ingested at persona, and starting to recommend content based on that persona data. Finally, start your persona activities, you're moving forward, how do you keep it going? Resources are always limited. How do we include personalization into our existing process to make it habitual and supportive? So the first step is start small. Start with one thing, start with one change. Measure the effectiveness of that, make another change. Report back on your findings to your peers, to your upward stakeholders. And that really helps sort of get by and motivation, get those quick wins, and focus on activities with the highest ROI. Be careful of over-reliance on sort of just looking at what behavior, try to understand why people are doing things and how you can make changes to really hit that, hit the mark with your users, and focusing effort on optimization over variety. So not changing content all the time. Freeze your homepage, make your homepage great, and focus on that. So lots of things you can do to make your data more actionable. Do customer research. Set up a user customer advisory board or focus group. Set up a booth and offer a pastry. Who doesn't like pastries? There are some. And focus as much as you can on collecting quality data, which is often more actionable as it makes us understand why people want what they want, not just what they want. Once you have a personalization engine in place, all these things become, some of these things become a lot easier. There are often survey tools built into these products and lots of different ways you can get. I get your data, sort of enrich your data. All right. So in conclusion, personalization over and over again is shown to have an enormous ROI. It's one of the highest ROI communities you can do. So if you're wondering how can I move the needle, this is a huge way you can do that. Outcomes are improved big time by understanding users and their motivations. If you just install, you know, lift and start using it, you're not gonna probably get as much value as if you start doing some research activities before you get there. The best idea is often talking to users and not looking at graphs and funnels. So having those conversations, understanding what users actually want is really critical. And then finally, when you're beginning personalization, start small and be sure to measure. So better test one or two changes and measure that and to make a lot of changes and feel attractive. I think we have, whoa, you got time. Look at that, seven minutes. I talked too fast. Which one was that? Was it this, was it the UX guys one? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Was it this one? Oh yeah, that was great, that's cool. Hey, I'm Frank Curie. I'm curious what your feedback it sounds like you may have worked on a few of these projects. A couple, we've mostly done the custom. We haven't yet done one of the personalization engine. I'm wondering if you found certain platforms, certain site types are easier or harder versus others say like news versus fashion or something. Right, right. Answer is the best of my ability. And then let me know if that answers your question. I think, so we've implemented it for a B2B site. It fits super naturally into the way that B2B site naturally is architected because that site is asking users, are you like a CEO or are you implementer? So that kind of data just is naturally being pulled into the site all the time. So that was a great sort of progression to fit super well with the way that they're thinking about the site already. I can also see a higher education site. How many of you are on higher ed? Oh, wow, okay, I'll talk. Higher ed sites are great for that. A lot of times you have things like a persona menu where you have different sort of ways of targeting your users where you're collecting that data all the time. So that can be another site that's just a natural next step for that site. Does that answer your question? Okay, great. So I had a question on the different options, custom, third-party, or Aquialift. I know the lift pricing and it's... Right, I wonder if that worked out well. For those of you who don't know, it's five figures, I think. It's expensive, it's expensive. So that might roll out for different groups that you're working with, but then so what is the benchmark for the free options that engage? Or if you've worked on custom solutions about how much time and money was that? Can you share that? I can definitely share that. So that's a great question. We thought about that a lot because we didn't want to implement something because there's also the recurring cost. Because once you have it, you need to continue to pay for the license. We chose to go custom because of that very reason. We felt that we were able to deliver something within sort of 20 to 30 hours worth of effort that was actually valuable and worth doing. So in that case it paid off. It was the right sort of investment. And we only need to really set up a few of those things once. We didn't feel we needed to spend another 5,000 or 10,000 the next year. So that's why we were custom. So I believe Lyft was previously in Drupal 7 based on the personalized module. But since then it's detached from that because that module has not been ported to Drupal 8. So right now, this is where I don't know. I tried to look around. I tried to poke around and try to find some Drupal 8 options. I couldn't find any that were in any kind of shape. Lyft is really the only thing I could find that was Drupal 8 ready. But obviously a lot of the third party options have incredible capabilities. Again, if the budget is not ready for that kind of option, then Drupal 8 may not be quite there yet. Yeah, definitely. I wonder what it could do. I wonder when this talk ends, I can put my slides up and I'll add them to the webpage of this talk. And then you can see that. Yeah, because it is hard to read some of these at the bottom. But anyway, I'll tell you what you do. You can go to Google, targetmarketing.com and Google Steven Yu. He's the guru guy. Steven Yu, why you? And he has about 10 articles in a series that are just like gold. Amazing. Is that it? Okay, thanks everybody. Thanks for your time. You did it. All right.