Your Personal Remix!

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Here and there, people talk about "Personalization". Content creators, marketers, designers, and product owners evaluate the possibilities and alternatives to handle custom scenarios while offering powerful experiences to the users. And we, the developers, have some ways to help with that. Let's talk about personalization, the benefits, the challenges, and how we can manage and offer personalized experiences in our Remix projects.

This talk has been presented at Remix Conf Europe 2022, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

FAQ

In web development, personalization refers to the ability to deliver content specifically tailored to individual users based on their behavior, preferences, and other personal data. This enables websites and web applications to offer unique, targeted experiences that can meet the specific needs and interests of each visitor.

Personalization on websites enhances user experience, increases engagement, and improves sales opportunities. It allows for optimized landing pages and targeted calls to action, leading to better qualified leads. Additionally, it strengthens brand affinity as users are more likely to recommend services that offer personalized experiences.

Websites can implement various types of personalization such as explicit, where data is directly provided by users; implicit, based on user behavior and environment; interrupted, offering unexpected interactions; and seamless, where personalization is integrated smoothly into the user experience, like recommended products or content.

Data for personalization can be collected through various methods including direct user inputs, mapping customer journeys, tracking with cookies, marketing emails, URL parameters, and using existing company records. This data helps create detailed customer profiles essential for effective personalization.

Implementing a personalization strategy involves collecting data, creating customer profiles, setting goals for what the personalization aims to achieve, planning and launching campaigns, and continuously testing and iterating based on performance and feedback.

Yes, Storyblock is a headless content management system that can be used with any framework or programming language. It provides a real-time visual editor and a component approach, allowing the creation of reusable content blocks that can be integrated into various frameworks, including Remix for personalization purposes.

An example of seamless personalization is Spotify's recommendation system, where the platform offers music suggestions based on a user's past listening habits. This type of personalization is integrated into the overall user experience, making it a natural part of the interaction with the product.

Facundo Giuliani
Facundo Giuliani
24 min
18 Nov, 2022

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Video Summary and Transcription

Today's Talk discusses Remix and Personalization, highlighting the benefits of personalized experiences in websites and web applications. Different types of personalization are explained, along with the steps to implement a personalization strategy. The use of Remix and Storyblock to implement personalized experiences on a website is demonstrated. The structure of a page with personalized content for different user types is shown, along with the use of cookies to identify user interests. The implementation of a personalization strategy using React components and the Storyblock API is explained.
Available in Español: ¡Tu Remix Personal!

1. Introduction to Remix and Personalization

Short description:

Today, we're going to talk about Remix and Personalization. Personalization is the ability to offer exclusive experiences to personas based on existing data. Web personalization delivers content granularly and offers exclusive experiences in websites and web applications. Examples include online retailers providing target offers based on user behavior and news platforms offering specific content based on user location. Personalization improves user experiences, generates better qualified leads, and enhances brand affinity.

Hello, everyone. My name is Facundo, and today, we're going to talk about Remix and Personalization. First of all, I want to introduce myself. As I said, my name is Facundo, Facundo Giuliani. I'm a developer relations engineer at Storyblock. I'm also one of the organizers of React Buenos Aires, the biggest React community in Argentina. And we also organize monthly in-person meetups in Buenos Aires, the city where I live in. And I'm also an Auth0 Ambassador, Prisma Ambassador, and Cloudinary Media Developer Expert.

You can find me on Twitter. My user is Facundo Surdo. So, has it happened to you that sometimes you go, well, not sometimes, but you go usually to the same coffee store and the waiters refer to you by name, or they already know what you are going to order, or probably you go to local breweries and the people working at the brewery, they recommend you new beers that are on tap based on other beers that you ordered in previous visits? If that happened to you, then in those scenarios, you are experiencing what we call personalization, which is the ability to offer exclusive experiences to personas based on existing data.

Probably the term data sounds kind of technique. But the truth is that based on things that we see, things that we can learn about the people, things that we can discover about them, we can offer these exclusive experiences to them and to satisfy their needs. Let's say we will talk about some of the benefits of personalizations later. But as we are talking about web development, we are going to talk about web personalization, which is this ability to deliver content granularly and offer these exclusive experiences in websites and web applications. Again, based on existing data, data that we are able to collect from the users and the people that are visiting our websites.

So examples of web personalization would be online retailers that are providing target offers to the people that are browsing their website based on their behavior. To give you an example, you can go to Amazon and you will see a section on the home page of Amazon with suggestions of articles that may be interesting for you based on previous purchases. Or for instance, you can go to news and media platforms and you can get specific content that may be interesting for you based, for instance, on where you are living. An example of that would be Netflix, where you get the top five TV shows and movies in your country. I live in Argentina and these are the shows that are trending right now. As you can see, the top one is related to soccer. That's because the soccer World Cup is just about to start. But you'll receive these suggestions and this specific content for you based on different details that the website, or the developers, or the product designers were able to get from you, from your behavior and from your environment.

So we talk about personalization, why we want to personalize our products, why we want to offer personalized experiences to the users. So first of all, we want the people that are visiting our websites to get great user experiences. If we offer personalized experiences to them, we are going to make them happier, they will get a better time when using our products and visiting our websites, for instance. And that will also help us from the sales perspective, because if we want to sell products, if we want to offer services, we will get better qualified leads, because the people that will be clicking on our call to actions, or visiting our catalogs, will be people that are actually interested in the products and the services that we offer, or the ones that we actually want to offer to them. Also, as I said, we can optimize our landing pages and call to actions on our website, because the people that are clicking on them, we have a way of identifying them and offering what they are looking for, or what we think is interesting for them. And finally, it will help us, our brand, to have a greater affirmity, because as a brand, we are going to be offering best experiences to the users, and our users will recommend us our services and products, and they will enjoy being part of the experiences that we offer.

2. Types of Personalization and Steps to Implement

Short description:

We have different types of personalizing experiences based on how we show personalized content and retrieve data. Explicit personalization uses data provided by users, like filling out a form. Implicit personalization uses user behavior and previous purchases. Interrupted personalization offers unexpected interactions or offers, like push notifications. Seamless personalization is integrated into the user's overall experience, like personalized music recommendations on Spotify. To implement a personalization strategy, we need to collect data, create customer profiles, set goals, and plan and implement the strategy.

We have different types of personalizing experience based on the way that we show the personalized content or how we personalize the experience of the users, and on the other hand, on the way on how we retrieve the information or the data that is going to help us to offer these personalized experiences. For instance, we can talk about explicit personalization when these experiences that we offer are based on data that was provided, well, explicitly by the users and visitors of our website. To give you an example, when we ask the user to fill a form or we ask them about their interest, we are getting explicit details of their interest.

On the other hand, we talk about implicit personalization when we get this data or these details based on the behavior of the users, previous purchases, where they are browsing our site from, where they live, et cetera. We are talking about an interrupted personalization when these experiences that we want to offer to the users, they are like some kind of interaction or offers that they are not expecting. To mention an example, an example of this interrupted personalization would be a modal in a website or a push notification on the phone offering, for instance, special products or offers based on where you live or the restaurants that you prefer to go or you usually go.

And the seamless personalization is the experience when it's a part of the whole application or the whole visit of your users when they are actually visiting our website or they are using our application. To mention an example of seamless personalization, it would be, for instance, when you are using Spotify and you have the section with recommended music based on your interest or what you were listening to the last week or the last month, for instance. That's something that you are expecting from the product and you expect it to be personalized based on your interest.

So, let's say that we want to implement a personalization strategy or a personalized experience for our users, we have some steps to follow. The first step would be collecting data from the visitors. We have different ways of collecting data. We can explicitly ask the visitors about details that will help us to offer them better experiences. We can map the customer journeys, we can track information with cookies or with marketing emails with URL parameters in the links that we include on our emails. We also can use company records, I mean records that we have on our company from the different customers that we are having or that we have contacted in the past.

The second step will be creating customer profiles. We are going to define the customer personas. These personas are going to be individuals that we are going to name, an age, description, and interests and on the other way that will help us to identify how to personalize their experience. I mean what will be the best way of offering them a personalized and custom experience when using our product.

The third step would be setting our goals. I mean what we want to get from these personalized experiences. We can for instance want to increase our conventions or reduce our bounce rate, or probably we want to improve ourselves, or we want to increase the retention of the people talking about our product or our website itself.

Finally, we need to plan and implement this strategy that we are taking. We need to identify the involved areas of our product, and the ones that we are going to modify or that will be involved in this process, in this campaign that we are going to create. We are going to draft a campaign to launch this personalized experience. We are going to prioritize the different campaigns that we may come up. For instance, we can think about different ideas on how to personalize the experience of the users. These ideas, they will have different impact. Some of them will have a bigger impact, but probably, they will take more time to implement. So, that's something that we can use to prioritize them and think on what would be the best strategy or the best campaign that we can go on and we can implement at this time.