What makes good products great? Make things personal.
Have you ever walked in to your favourite cafe and been warmly welcomed by the barista who knows your name and your order?
It’s a really nice experience and it feels personal. Like you have a connection with that person rather than it feeling just like a transaction.
When we’re using digital products we crave these same personal interactions. We want products to understand us and what we’re trying to achieve and then make those things easy.
This happens with product personalisation, an extra layer of UX design that can take a good product and make it exceptional.
In this post I’ll outline some great and not so great examples of what this looks like along with how you can get started regardless of whether your designing a B2B SaaS tool, a consumer app or anything in between.
Examples — The good
It’s no surprise that the most loved products on our phones are doing a fantastic job at personalisation.
Spotify — Uniquely yours
When you open Spotify, you want the right music to suit your current mood. But moods change and what we feel like listening to on a workday vs a Saturday night is very different.
Spotify cleverly use day of the week, time and location to present recommendations that suit the moment: focus music for work on a weekday and bangers on the weekend.
Spotify’s Made for you playlists tailored to our listening habits have become so good that we literally don’t need to make our own playlists anymore, Spotify does a better job.
Google — Take me home
Google is a master at using time and location to adapt based on whats going on in our lives outside the app. Google knows whether we’re at work or home and will adapt with different traffic and transport suggestions to get us where we want to go.
Flo — your friendly assistant
Flo is a brilliantly designed cycle tracking app for women that offers incredibly deep personalisation.
Women enter their personal goals (track cycle, fall pregnant), cycle dates and daily symptoms and then Flo provides predictions based on exactly what to expect each day.
Flo deepens their personalisation by delivering these insights via Flo-Assistant, a friendly chat bot that actually feels real.
The entire product feels personal, it draws you back each day and makes you feel like your engaging with a real personal.
Examples — The not so good
For personalisation to work it needs to feel natural and be useful. Here are a couple of examples that showcase that not all personalisation enhances the experience.
ClassPass — a confused home page
ClassPass is a great offering and although they do have some personalisation, they haven’t invested in the areas that really matter: helping their users find, book and attend classes easily.
The “For You” page doesn’t help me quickly do the things that matter and instead is really just a promotional space that I find myself navigating away from.
This could be the perfect location to bake in meaningful personalisation.
ClassPass know the types of classes I like, my existing schedule and location. They could use this information to intuit what I need to do each time I open the app.
For example when I have an empty schedule this is when they should encourage me to book classes near me. But when I open the app ahead of an upcoming class, it should be easy to check the time and details.
Commbank — For you, for who?
Commbank is a well designed app, managing money is intuitive, but this is where the value proposition and personalisation stops.
Although there is a page in the app titled “For you” this feels like just a way to promote different products rather than actually things for me.
We all have different financial goals (budgeting for a holiday, increasing shares etc.) Commbank could identify what these are and then deliver a personalised product experience that helps users achieve them.
This is the approach smaller competitors like Up Bank are taking to help their users not only manage money but also achieve their financial goals.
Visibuild — a frustrating feed
I’m not afraid to share that the first version of the Visibuild home page is poor example of personalisation.
We wanted to create a home page that would allow our users to keep track of their assigned items but what we ended up with was a feed that actually made their lives harder as they were forced to endlessly scroll to find what they needed.
Luckily this was just v1 and we’ve been able listen to our customers feedback and iterate.
Our users are incredibly busy and the things they are trying to do differ depending on time of day and where they’re located: on their construction site or back in the office on their computer.
We went back to the drawing board to figure out exactly what our users need to do and how those things differ depending on role, time of day and their location.
This allowed us to redesign the home experience to offer personalised suggestions based on time and location making it simple for them to achieve their goals every time they open our app.
How to personalise your product
Personalisation can be as simple as greeting users by name when they first log-in, or as targeted as suggesting yoga classes to women at 9am on Saturday mornings in their area. The key involves making each of your users feel connected to your product and helping them achieve their unique goals.
Personalisation approaches
There are two key ways to think about personalisation (which can be combined):
- Individual-based: Adapting the experience to suit the individual, their goals, interests or behaviour. Spotify’s made for you personalised playlists are a great example of this.
- Situation-based: Adapting to the users current situation when they open your product. Google is using situation-based personalisation to adapt transport suggestions based on whether your at home or work.
The best examples of personalisation combine these two techniques to create a deeper experience suited both to the individual and their situation at a given time.
Which factors can you leverage to deliver a personalised experience for your users?
Every product is going to be different so the factors that influence your users and their situation might be different to those above. The key is to figure out what matters to your users in helping them achieve their goals.
What does a typical day for your users look like?
A really useful technique to map out which factors matter in your experience is to create a “day-in-the-life-of” timeline to showcase a typical day for your users. For your product it might make more sense to create a week, month or even year timeline.
The example below is a typical day for a Visibuild user and describes the times they need our product as well as everything else going on in their day.
The powerful thing in this approach is that it forces you to zoom out from your own product journey’s and consider the big picture of someone’s day and how various factors impact what they are likely to do.
Where to start? Start small.
As you begin to map out all the ways you can add personalisation it might feel a little overwhelming. Where do you start? How much is too much?
My advice is to start small. Personalisation can go deep, but even the simple things will go along way in elevating the experience and helping be more successful.
Why not just start with welcoming them by name? Or provide personalised quick actions on their home page so they can quickly jump into what matters in the moment?
Personalisation is one of the most important techniques we have to make our users successful. Let’s move beyond transactional product experiences and instead follow the lead of our friendly local barista to make things personal.
