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Hello all, I'm looking for some example sites that offer some UI treatments of content personalization, indicating what areas have changed or are updated once personalized.

For example, a common effect is to have a yellow background that fades out on any content that has changed. This seems to work fairly well if all your content has the same visual treatment, i.e., they're all on a white background.

Can anyone refer me to sites that do something different and work with different visual treatments of the content? For example content with special promo backgrounds, content with colored backgrounds, content with white background, content in carousels, content in various modules, etc.?

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2 Answers

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I think that personalized content, if it is placed in the same page alongside "general" content - can be extremely tricky and problematic.

Sites I've seen that do it well actually devote a separate, dedicated page for personalized content.

Some examples of these are: - iGoogle or My Yahoo - popurls and Alltop

Amazon also does some personalization, and it denotes those sections by highlighting that those items are "yours", e.g. : - "You viewed" - "Hello, Boon Y. Chew" - "Related to Items You've Viewed"

Amazon's experience is a bit more seamless, since most people really want to shop - so Amazon's main page really becomes a marketing tool featuring personalized recommendations.

Other personalized sites I've seen offer layout control - e.g. news.google.com

So, all the examples above are fairly straightforward and easy to navigate and use because they behave just like content on an un-personalized page on the same site, except that users are given a limited amount of freedom to customize the page. Also, I think using "visual treatments" to denote personalized content could lead to confusion.

Does this answer your question?

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The site I'm working on, the content everywhere can change and content modules have different UI treatments, some are featured content, some are promos, promos in the sidebar have a different background than promos in the content well, carousel content can change, etc. Think like going to CNN, entering your zip code and you'd get regional news intermixed with CNN content. I've built a "highlight my regional info" checkbox, which works OK, I suppose, I'm just looking for other options which might be more elegant. – magenta placenta Feb 2 at 21:17
This sounds like a bit of user testing might help get you the right "balance" and ideas for what works and won't. Also - do the users need to know which sections have been personalized? I could be wrong here, but AdSense ads are somewhat "targeted" content as well, but it doesn't tell the user that it is. I think that if colors are being used - use up to maybe 2 or 3 maximum. Alternatively, you could employ the use of icons to denote "my" content. But try not to overwhelm the user with too many indicators - colors, icons or otherwise. – Boon Chew Feb 2 at 22:31
User testing showed us that users weren't aware content was really changing/being tailored to their location. I don't think icons are going to work - they'd still have to scan the entire page looking for tiny icons intermixed in the UI and I doubt they'd work in the various modules we have - different background colors, one promo module has a background image, the modules can have optional photos. If everything were basically served up as a list (like popurls) then sure, it'd be easy to differentiate an icon bullet versus no bullet or a regular browser-styled bullet. – magenta placenta Feb 2 at 23:38
As a better example than CNN, take a look at mayoclinic.org, see how they have modules with brown headers on white background, then on the top right they have blue modules then on the bottom right they have the brown header/white background but icons on each content entry. They have a couple modules, but there's a bit of variance in them. So imagine personalizing the content on this page, how would you reflect local info in the "traveling to mayo clinic" module, the "why choose mayo clinic module", the "medical edge" module. – magenta placenta Feb 2 at 23:42
I'm sorry I don't really see what you mean. The "variance" in modules is a visual design effect meant to help break up the content types, to help users find things on the page. I still don't think visual variance needs to be applied to denote personalization - I don't see why users need to know they're being shown personalized content. – Boon Chew Feb 3 at 0:00
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Are there any open source applications?

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