- Website personalisation
- 2009-12-16: It was my g/f's birthday recently and I went to see Peter Brewer Goldsmith Jeweller to see if between me and him we could work out what she might want and it was, frankly, pathetic (me, not him). I had no clue.
- So I took my g/f there and it worked like this. We said "bracelet maybe" and he got one out and we tried it and we said "too chunky" and he got lighter ones. We said they didn't sit right, so he got others out. Finally we settled on one.
- Basically, he was using his knowledge and experience to, in my world, do a binary chop.
- A binary chop is the fastest way to find a record in a list (a piece of jewellery the customer will like). Let's say you have weighed all your fruit and arranged them in order of their weight. You have a new piece of fruit you want to put into the arrangement. Choose the piece of fruit in the middle of the arrangement. Is your piece lighter or heavier than that? Disregard the 'wrong' half of the list. Now do the same on the half you're keeping, take a piece in the middle, is your fruit lighter or heavier, etc. Basically you'll find where your new fruit needs to go in the least number of weight-checks.
- When we said "that bracelet doesn't sit right", Peter Brewer made a mental binary chop with his stock. He knew it wasn't sitting right because of the shape of my g/fs wrist or the style of the bracelet or that's how they are supposed to sit we are just ignorant or whatever, and he disregarded a portion of his bracelet stock and chose again from the remaining possibilities. We iterated our way forward until we found something she liked.
- Humans can do that on the fly because the way the stock is chopped up is different every time. The next person might have been more interested in the weight of gold, or the spiritual significance of the jewels.
- And that's the problem with most e-commerce setups, like Retro 36 for instance. Want to see things related to dinosaurs for a 5 year old? Can't do it. There's one categorisation method and that's it.
- So one of the things I like to do is to make websites bend to the will of the visitor. Personalisation might be what I do. But it's usability too, it's basically acknowledging that every visitor will bring with them a whole load of assumptions and life experiences and abilities before they even start to think about what they want to buy, and every one will approach it differently.
- One issue with having lots of stock is how not to bamboozle the new visitor.
- So one thing I've just programmed for Metcalfe Insurance is a little bit of personalisation.
- That word cloud, it's currently showing the most popular pages. But as you use it, it'll show more of YOUR most popular pages.
- So if you use Metcalfe for car insurance, the next time you visit, the link to 'car' insurance will be that much bigger and that much easier for you to find. But when I visit it won't show car insurance bigger, it'll display my preferences instead.
- It's just the start, but ultimately, the Metcalfe insurance website will show you the sorts of insurances you're interested in, and none of those you're not. So it will look like just exactly the kind of insurance company you're looking for.
- Neat, eh?
- I just realised, I worked out how I was going to program that by writing literally on the back of an envelope. I like that.
Next: Shane Dawson -
Previous: A climate change suggestion -
Back to blog list
Tweet this blog 
Share 
Bookmark