Progressive Profiling
What, Why and How?
Have you ever come across situations where you have to fill lengthy forms in order to get on boarded into some application? Of course the experience is tiring. Also, you might get the feeling why these information are needed? And whether those are mandatory to provide?
Yes. This is a valid thought for many of the application consumers, And the solution is Progressive Profiling.
Progressive Profiling is the concept where you collect information at the time where you exactly need it, and also if you haven’t provided it before.
The purpose of Progressive Profiling is to get to know the consumer in a natural way, without bombarding them in the initial registration process for the application. This prevents systems collecting too much information too soon. Also, this helps to build trust within the consumer on the application as well.
Nowadays people expect greater personalisation, and in the same time worry about the data that they provide for applications or companies. Collecting customer information is needed for most of the application inorder to provide customers an unique experience based on their needs and behaviours. Therefore Progressive Profiling balances the personalisation and data privacy.
For example in order for a user to onboard you don’t need all the information. But you might need those eventually when you are going to perform specific task. At that point the application can pop up a form to collect such information.
This way consumer will understand why this information was needed by the application.
Benefits of Progressive Profiling?
Consumers will not get bombarded with unnecessary questions.
Requiring too much information on the onboarding time makes an application less attractive to the consumer .Each additional question or information asked at the time of onboarding makes friction towards onboarding process. Users might go away even without registering into an application if there are unnecessary information is asked or if they get bored.
Consumers will have an idea on for what these information is collected.
Ones information required is popped up at the time that is actually required makes consumer to be aware of what for these information is needed.
Consumers will not be asked to provide the same information twice.
Sometimes users might be asked for same information multiple times when they are performing different different actions. But with progressive profiling users will not be asked for information if those are already provided. Sometimes users may be asked for the consent to use those information for another purpose.
Reliable Data Collection
Most of the time when information is collected at the time of onboaridng people provide data just to pass the registration step and start consuming services. With this way the if too much data collected at the initial step, those might be unreliable. Users might have typed some bogus values inorder to bypass the registration step.
How to implement Progressive Profiling?
Progressive profiling can be implemented by your applications by collecting information time to time when those are needed. For applications that is connected with each and another, there could be popups at the time when accessing the applications, as well as performing certain tasks.
Mostly enterprise level applications are connected with many other systems. And those applications might be connected with Enterprise level identity providers. In such scenario these IDPs can be configured request information as per the requirement of the application that consumer tries to access.
Progressive Profiling with WSO2 Identity Server or Asgardeo
Let’s look at how Asgardeo, an enterprise grade identity provider is supporting you to implement progressive profiling for your applications very easily.
Following is the Asgardeo console, where administrators can configure applications that needs to be connected with. Within application configurations, under User-Attributes tab, it is possible to configure what user attributes needs to be accessed by the application and whether those are mandatory.
Now, when you login to your application and provide with relevant credentials, you will be asked for your consent to access, already provided attribute values, and after that you will be prompted to provide values for the mandatory attributes you marked before.
This consent pop up will only appear when you are accessing the application for the first time.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Progressive Profiling helps application developers to optimise user collection and present a tailor made experience to the consumer. Therefore this improves User experience as well as helps to build consumer trust.
