Making it Personal: Designing “My” Web
Jen Consalvo likes to go searching for clams with her dad. But she doesn’t like to go searching for the information she wants. She knows you don’t either. She knows you’d rather have it delivered in a more personal way.
In her work as Director of Personalization at AOL, Jen is seeing the amount of personalized information delivered over the Web intensify. In the past, personal information delivery was reserved for places like Amazon.com and a few others. Suddenly it’s everywhere, from news sites, to music sites, to children’s toys.
Jen says these types of personal content delivery sites are popular with users (aka: people who buy things), because they require less effort on the part of the users, and add more value to their day-to-day on-line life.
She and her team are responsible for bringing this type of end user value to AOL, and she’s been very busy doing just that. As a matter of fact, she started her personalization efforts working with RSS. When that caught on, personalization morphed into helping people customize the content they receive. Even more, the end goal is to customize the entire Web experience, helping users discover content they may not have found on their own.
She likes to think of it as “Taking some of the work out of it for people.” AOL has some exciting new products that do this and will be rolling out soon. One is the new version of Feed Reader. It has some cool new features described by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. And for those of you attending Web Content 2007, you will get a sneak preview of it and one or two more of AOL’s top-secret personalized content delivery products during Jen’s presentation.
She will give you an overview of the incredible innovation going on with personalization over the Web, and what she calls the most important factor in developing new products for the web. Hint: It has to do with your customers. Hear her discussion at Making it Personal: Designing “My” Web on Day Two of the Content Development and Management track
