A lot of companies are beginning to put a lot of emphasis on personalisation of software, systems and even hardware. I guess the question at some point has to be asked, what is personalisation to the individual? Surely personalisation is something different to each individual. It is not always about the stylisation of information, or even how that information is portrayed but also to some degree also about the way the systems are used, or even how you interact with the hardware.
There have been a few conversations between myself and friends about how people interact with systems and where these systems or rather the design of both hardware and software make it very different for each individual to feel 100% comfortable with the system. People instinctively don't like to have to log on to something to personalise it. They want it to be intuitive, and to just know that it is them using it... they want something that they find easy to use, information represented in a manner that makes sense to them. In my case I like lists of facts, other people prefer images and graphs. I guess it all depends on who you are and what it is that you are trying to do.
Based on what I have noted from talking to people, systems need to be intelligent, intuitive and adaptable as well as being interactive and simple, but with the subtle intricacies that are only apparent to the most astute of users. This is the time of the interactive system designer... the architect and the user.
More and more software engineering is moving away from the low level programming and complex programming, and into information flow, interface design and interactivity. It doesn't matter what sort of system that you are designing or developing these days if it doesn't flow in a usable manner, people don't want to use it, and eventually it get's re-designed into what it should have been in the first place.
I'm not going to go into detail about how to make things context aware... this I leave to you to define... lets see where it leads.
Feel free to put your views forward about what you see personalisation as and how you would define it... where would you like to see it going in the future. The above are just a few comments and ideas that have been floating for a while.
posted @ Monday, May 29, 2006 10:01 AM