Terminology for personalisation (and stuff)

Hi everyone,

Something to feed into the personalisation discussion, and make sure we mean the same things in the group.

What’s the difference between these terms?

·         Adaptation

·         Customisation

·         Personalisation

We have used these terms interchangeably so far; I think we need to be clear (or at least clear when they are the same!).

If you look at what personalisation means in the web industry [1, 2], it often means something that the website does based on the behaviour of the user, rather than an explicit choice. It can be implicit (e.g. ads based on purchases), explicit (choosing a colour scheme), or a hybrid.

I did a fairly lengthy blog post on this before [3], but in summary I suggest:


  *   Adaptation = something a user does to the website without the website explicitly providing an option for it (e.g. linearization, changing colours through the browser etc.)

  *   Personalisation = Customisation = Something the website provides that the user can utilise, either through their user-agent or via an onsite widget. The difference being that making that choice changes the website according to an option it has provided.

We could get fancy and use customisation for the explicit choice and personalisation for the implicit one, but having thought about it a little I didn’t see the value of doing so.

The key one is adaptation vs personalisation, as they require very different levels of authoring support.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define+personalisation+website&oq=define+personalisation+website

2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalization

3] https://alastairc.ac/2017/02/four-levels-of-accessibility-customisation/


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