We all love it when brands make us feel special, but how forgiving are we when they get it wrong?

Large strides have been already made in terms of personalization through customized content. Visit Amazon.com for example (my site is on page 24 of that book by the way). If you’ve been there before and sign in, Amazon welcomes you by name, and suggests items that it thinks you’d be interested in. In the case of a hotel, go to a hotel enough times and they’ll remember little details like the fact you enjoy an extra pillow, or what your favorite daily is and provide both of them for you before you enter your room. However, let’s look at this in a different way.

Are the potential gains of creating a positive, customized user-experience worth the risk of getting it wrong from time to time?

It has been said that no two people are alike, but if we generalize enough, we can segment audiences and markets. That’s what all of marketing intelligence is about after all. Web analysts extract behaviours and wants (and hopefully demands) from the volumes of visitor data and all the other internal records at their disposal to serve as the basis of customization systems whose purposes are to make customers feel welcomed and valued. But despite everyone’s best efforts, mistakes do happen.

Consider this, Walmart, a few years ago, “recommended a film about Martin Luther King Jr. to potential buyers of a “Planet of the Apes” DVD” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10730202/). Damage control must of been in high gear that day and probably left a permanent bad taste in a few customers’ mouths. Whether or not Walmart actually lost customers over this incident is unclear. However one thing is for sure, there was bad press and it wouldn’t be far fetched to assume that even bigger hiccups than this could occur in the future.

Are there times when adapting content for users is dangerous?

Let’s put PR and hurt feelings aside for a moment. There are some cases where identifying personality-types and leveraging this knowledge could be potentially dangerous. For example, take users that can be categorized as substance-abusers or compulsive gamblers. Feeding into their tendencies, though profitable, could be detrimental to their well-beings. In fact, if adaptive systems advance even further, it might be necessary to set guidelines on how they are used to protect vulnerable consumers. And what if governments were to impose their influence on these adaptive systems? Could this be a tool for online propaganda or censorship? Could web logs incriminate users or make them political targets? To deal with these scenarios, it may be necessary for these systems to develop morals.

Customized user-experience: It’s the new black.

Despite any moral implications, customized user-experiences are here to stay, and in fact, they will become more prevalent in the years to come. Consider some other adaptive technologies in the pipeline:

• In 2003, IBM developed a way to customize the grocery shopping experience by helping shoppers know of specials in certain isles, etc via a small terminal attached to shopping carts. It’s only a matter of time until they work out all the angles on this one and introduce it to more grocery chains.
• MIT is working on websites that adapt. These adapting sites change their content and layout for unknown users in order to better suit their preferences. It is predicted that  this technology, when implemented on a site, could increase sales up to 20%. MIT plans to launch their first full version of this technology in the near future in Japan.

If you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em.

It’s not about whether this will happen, it’s about when it will happen. The web industry has remain vigilant, constantly determine the new metrics, and have the strength of character to remain ethical despite the temptation of possible easy gains. Discussions at the early stage will help steer new technologies and prepare us for the future.

What do you think of customized user-experience? Should we embrace it, or discourage it?