Trend watch: Personalisation

Personalisation has become more and more in focus for all kind of software and online experiences including gamification. We strongly believe in the need to carry out user research to create user experiences that will engage your audience in their way. So personalisation is really tailoring your offering to an audience of one rather than many.

The rise in popularity has dual reasons, generation Y is more focused on planet me which is one side of the equation with this group as consumers with disposable income is growing into their careers. The second reason is that technology is making personalisation more and more possible.

Organisations like Amazon have been fine-tuning your offering for some time. The more you engage with their service, the better the suggestions, because their smart recommender engine is continuously learning about you when you interact with it. Facebook tries to give you messages and news you prefer based on your interactions with your friends and the status updates you make. The more they gather information about you, the more likely you are to see material you actually want to read.

In an increasingly impersonal world where apps are taking the place of human interaction, we still crave some basic human needs such as the need tone respected and valued as an individual. The predication is that technology is advancing fast enough to create better more personalised interaction through systems than humans can provide. Because systems can handle more data and offer personalised advice on a larger background research set.

Personalisation of our work tools is next in line. So far it is still early days in most companies, yet having a personalised ERP or LMS system is not that far fetched. We are playing with adaptive technology and recommender engines in the back of our community and website, because great technology has become more accessible to most.

From a gamification design perspective it means building in personalisation as a way of improving design. The starting design will continuously evolve based on data gathered and choices made by the individuals using the tools you have gamified.