Personalization or Commodification

These two articles go great together, but not like peanut butter and chocolate. More like oil and vinegar — two great tastes that don’t easily mix but go make leaves taste better.

Lemme explain. The first article opens like this:

Every moment, behind the scenes, the products you use are getting better at anticipating your needs and desires. Your Netflix homepage updates in real time, your food delivery app predicts what you’re craving, and your fitness app fine-tunes recommendations based on your recent activity. This is hyper-personalization — an advanced approach to personalization that leverages real-time data, artificial intelligence (AI), and behavioral analytics to deliver highly individualized experiences for every user.

This sounds for a split second like a great thing. The author certainly thinks it was worth exploring. And I am sure most clients would take the idea at face value and say “Yes!” give our customers that! They need it, they want it, they crave it.

But think about it for more than two seconds and it becomes a capitalist’s wet dream — remove individual agency from a whole slew of money-spending decisions. Don’t make the customer think — ever — or they might think I really don’t need another whatever it is they are selling. These self-contained bubbles have worked so well for social media and society, we should make every website do this, right?

The other article explores the dystopian side of personalization and how it has been playing out across Apps:

If you watch a reel for longer than three seconds you can expect more like it. If you linger on a photo, pause mid-scroll, replay a TikTok – that’s the new like. Platforms today care far less about your explicit choices, and more about your passive ones. […] This behavioural model promised a more authentic insight into our preferences. After all, what we do is often far more telling than what we say. […] But as we’ve come to understand how these systems work, we’ve also begun to perform for them, whether consciously or not.

I often think about how systems that we have designed to do something for us are training us to behave a certain way. We perform for machines and “speak machine” all the time. We hardly ever get them to work for us, with us, in an actual real-language sort of way like we would with another human. Even AI supposed natural language model is not natural. Using “please” and other extra words is too expensive! We should be talking to our natural-language robots like robots!

But I digress.

The personalization deep-dive article does do its diligence by exploring ethical concerns, data privacy, and seems to focus on Apps which users opt into downloading and using. Personalization as a tool in the toolkit makes sense in some cases. I have a few clients whose user base would benefit, primarily because both clients have SO much content that it is unwieldy to offer everything to everyone all the time — for us and for the consumer.

On the other side, though, is the performative aspect. We know these apps are watching us, and very rarely do we have any control over why they are recommending one piece of content over another. We’ve all seen ads in our feed that seem random and off the map, and we wonder what did I do to make the app think that is relevant to me? Then, on the other side, we’ve seen a content suggestion that makes us think the app is listening over our shoulder when we are not using it. Which is better?

Making the invisible visible is the motto I’d prefer to design by. I am exploring ideas around personalization at the moment and I want to design a system that I would actually want to use. One that could help me sift through oceans of content to only see what I wanted to see, but not one that would hide it away forever. And not a system that feels like it is surveilling me without consent.

Agency is the key word here. We all need a little more agency, especially in these fraught political and social times.

Agency is the sense of control that you feel in your life, your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations. Your sense of agency helps you to be psychologically stable, yet flexible in the face of conflict or change. Agency is your very own power, your ability, to affect the future.