[Web4lib] user designed web sites / pages

[Tim Spalding]

> I remember in library school about 5 years ago, I had a professor who was
> positive that someday soon, we were all going to be customizing web pages to
> our needs and wants.  I see the BBC home page now does this
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/  I can decide if I want or don't want sports news
> when I get to this page.  Are there any libraries designing their home pages
> this way?  How difficult or expensive is this?
>
> Angela

I thought I'd respond in some depth, from the perspective of a
library-related site that has its share of personalization. I've come
to mistrust it.

First, both personalization and its opposite—single-focus
optimization—will always be with us. But fashions come and go. For a
few years—2003-2006?—personalization was hot, particularly in search.
Companies like Rollyo and Eurekster got a lot of attention, and both
Yahoo and Google added a certain amount of personalization. Interest
has fizzled—the companies above are virtually without traffic--and the
consensus is that Google's personalized search—rolled out in 2005 and
expanded in 2007—has not been a game-changer.

Some arguments against personalization:

1. Features are hard, and personalization is no exception. If you're
going to have it, it's best if it's "baked into" your algorithms,
schemas, designs and such from day one. You don't want to add it
later.

2. In my experience, the vast majority of people don't want to
personalize *features*. They'll personalize profiles on MySpace or
whatever—which is really self-expression—but are much less likely to
play with preferences and settings. Personalization asks regular users
to behave like power users--like programmers behave. Most aren't
interested.

3. Personalization increases maintenance and testing. When someone
works one way, and something—like a database schema or a
stylesheet—changes, you just have to make sure it works as it used to,
and test that. Personalization can turn changing, maintaining and
testing simple changes into complex "what if" scenarios. What if the
user had these settings, or those? Personalization also multiplies
every help page, how-to document, walk-through and etc.

4. Personalization dissipates developer- and user-energy that might
have gone into creating the best answer. I see this again and again on
LibraryThing. If you let people personalize, the dedicated, talkative
users make their own personal nirvana and the rest suffer through
whatever default feature set you offer. The developers feel that, if
everyone *can* be happy, everybody will. This way lies every complex,
over-engineered product out there. Really successful designs, like the
Apple iPod minimze personalization, and indeed features.

5. Personalization locks developers down. Allowing a user to
personalize something is a promise of sort—a promise that you'll keep
things working the way they chose. This makes it hard to change an
application—even to make improvements. You don't want to get stuck
maintaining a dozen different personalization options. And you want
the freedom to improve things. On LibraryThing, for example, some of
the power users have turned off certain features—and now, when I
improve them, I have to choose between them not seeing the improved
feature or going against their preference and re-introducing them to
the feature they discarded.

Some arguments in favor:

1. Personalization makes power users happy. Happy power users are the
seed of a product--particularly a Web 2.0 product. Making them happy
can be worth it.

2. Personalization makes an application feel richer. LibraryThing has
in general aimed for this "rich" feeling, not the stripped-down feel
of an iPod or etc.

3. Personalization can blunt criticism. Although dangerous for a
variety of reasons, personalization--allowing members to turn
something off--can dissipate criticism of a particular feature. We've
done that a few times.

4. Personalization is often easy to implement. (The "cost" comes down
the road.)

Best,
Tim