Like other forms of Personalization, App Personalization refers to the process of making an app to specifically fit a users needs. Unlike a website, which broadly caters to the all audience in the same way, App Personalization presents user experience that are customized to the needs of likes of a specific audience or specific user.Â
More than 2 million apps available on both App store and Google play store with more than 3,000 apps added to the list daily. The more the apps users download, the lesser the amount of attention each app gets. It’s highly unlikely a user will return to using an app if their first experience with the app is bad. Think about it, you may have a hundred apps on your phone, but you may only use about 10 regularly. From this we can understand how important user experience is. Personalization is one of ways you can make your app stand out and have your audience continue to use it as it tries to make the app act exactly as the user wants.
To create a personalized experience for your audience you need to understand what they want. Once you have that kind of data, you are good to go. Personalization can be done on 3 levels and there are various methods that you can use to retrieve that information.
This is pretty simple. It is basic knowledge on the kind of audience using your app. Are they male or female? How old are they? What do they like? What do they dislike? With this information you can display content that are only relevant to that kind of audience. You can ask these questions to your audience straight forward while they start using the app or retrieve information from other platforms like Facebook or emails with the permission of the user
Another way to personalize the app is through finding out information of where, when and how long a user uses a certain device. For example, A food delivery app only shows you places that will accept orders from your selective area and show food options like breakfast places in the morning and dinner places in the evening depending on the time.
This is the most powerful type of targeting. In this kind of testing you actually use the behavior of the user to customize the app. For example if a customer has shown an interest towards a certain brand of products in an e-commerce website, the app can on real time basis, show more of that brands products, and emphasize on the deals offered on that brands products. This kind of targeting is great for the personal experience of a user.
This method can be used prior to bringing personalization changes to an app. All app users are presented with either an altered version of the app or the normal version of the app without their knowledge. This altered version can be a change in UI, UX, content, methods of personalization etc. Once you have derived a method that seems to be working with your audience, it can be implemented in the long term.
