Notes

Outline

Personalization and Web Design Monica Bonett, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK M.Bonett@ukoln.ac.uk

Overview Motivation for providing personalization Terms and Techniques Issues: Privacy, Usability Use of Frameworks and Standards Examples in Learning and Teaching The IMesh Toolkit Project

Why Tailor Content? Build personal relationships treat the user as an individual increase user loyalty Control information overload Improve accessibility cater for variation in physical capabilities adapt to different devices or connection modes

Desired Outcomes Increase user satisfaction Repeat visits e.g. saved information Increase sales or popularity …. in general, to meet the user’s needs or preferences

Kinds of Preferences Look and feel Channels of information Customise parameters e.g. search Methods of delivery Tastes/interests (recommendations)

How preferences are stated Explicitly Form filling Ratings Inferred click-throughs purchases can be implicit

Using the Preferences of Others Commonly used for recommendations Collaborative Filtering recommendation seeker expresses preference by rating an item/s matching people determined by comparing tastes recommendation/s generated Various algorithms

Issues: Usability Personalization is not an excuse for poor usability Cater for users who want to do sophisticated customisation, and those who will do none Provide adequate defaults to meet basic needs Monitor usage patterns

Issues: Privacy Potentially large amounts of information are collected, sometimes implicitly P3P: a W3C proposal Privacy Statements exactly what information is collected how it is used (why is it needed ?) how widely shared

Standards and Frameworks

The Argus Framework

Framework Components Users have profiles that represent their interests and behaviours Content is profiled, based on a set of attributes that are assigned specific values The business context has certain rules that govern how personalization happens. match attributes of the content with attributes captured in the user profile to determine which content to display.

Describing Users: Metadata IMS describes characteristics of a learner to enable exchange of learner information structured information model (XML binding) eduPerson EDUCAUSE/Internet2 task force LDAP (directory building)

Example 1: IMS example attributes identification (names, addresses, demographics) accessibility (cognitive, technical, physical, language) interest (information describing hobbies and recreational activities)

Example 2: eduPerson Example attributes eduPersonAffiliation (person’s relationship to the institution student, staff etc.) eduPersonNickname (informal name) preferredLanguage

Accessing profiles: SOAP W3C working draft (Version 1.2) Supports communication in a distributed environment Exchange of structured information based on XML User preferences could be exchanged in this way

SOAP Example Get price of books from ISBN number

The IMesh Toolkit

Portability: the vision "For the end user it would be a much better world if he or she could simply have a program pass a collection of history and opinion data to each system he or she wishes to interact with and instantly obtain personalized behaviour and where appropriate recommendations from it”  (Cliff Lynch, June 2001)

Sharing User Descriptions Example: P3P - a W3C proposed recommendation users can describe their privacy preferences websites disclose how they handle information make information available in machine-readable format Identify commonality Allow for variation

Acknowledgments The IMesh Toolkit Project Funded by JISC/NSF Based at UKOLN Working with Pete Cliff, Rachel Heery, Andy Powell and  Richard Waller, ILRT (Bristol), ISP (University of Wisconsin, USA) In collaboration with Resource Discovery Network (RDN) and Subject Portals Project (SPP) Thanks also to Keith Instone and Argus Associates