Section 2: The new information environment

Me, me, me: personalisation

How many personalised services do you use regularly? Have you got an Amazon account that recalls your purchases and suggests things that you might be interested in? Or maybe you use Tesco's online shopping for your groceries?

Search engines, library databases and online shops are all offering some degree of personalisation as a means of retaining customer loyalty. What do we really mean by personalisation? Riecken defines it as:

. building customer loyalty by building a meaningful one-to-one relationship; by understanding the needs of each individual and helping satisfy a goal that efficiently and knowledgeably addresses each individual's need in a given context. To extend this point, it is about the mapping and satisfying of a user's/customer's goal in a specific context with a service's/business's goal in its respective context.

Amazon's recommender service is a good example of this. By recalling the books you have purchased when you log into Amazon, the system matches your interests and presents you with some recommendations in an attempt to tempt you into buying more. Of course, if you have been buying items as presents then these recommendations may not be relevant to you, but that's one of the limitations of the system.

Activity Think about the personalised services you use. Select 'New journal entry' in MyStuff (opens in new window) and note what the services allow you to do and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

How does this affect the way people find and use information? In 2007 Google combined two of its personalisation services: Google Personalized Homepage and Google Personalized Search (Kamvar and Mayer, 2007). What is key to this is that over a period of time, the search engine gets to know your preferences and tailors the results of your searches accordingly.

Activity Do you think this personalisation is a good thing? Can you think of any occasions when this would hinder information retrieval? Continue your notes in MyStuff (opens in new window) with your thoughts on this topic.