Content Personalization

Definition

Content Personalization

the content management task during which the content is personalized to meet the specific desires and needs of each individual user or group of related users

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Content Personalization is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Task
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of Content Personalization are to:

• Identify external potential content to be acquired:
  • Textual content.
  • Numerical content.
  • Audio content.
  • Graphical content.
  • Video content.
• Develop templates and tools for converting external content into the proper format.
• Develop metadata about the external content and store it in the content metadata database of the content management system.
• Acquire the external content from the external content sources.
• Reformat and store the external potential content in the draft content database of the content management system.

Preconditions

Content personalization typically can begin when the following preconditions hold:

• The construction phase has started.
• The initial conventions for content acquisition (e.g., guidelines, standards) have been produced during the process engineering activity.
• The following documents are largely complete and are relatively stable:
  • System Requirements Specification
  • Glossary
  • Domain Model Document
  • Information Architecture Document
  • Database Design Document
  • Human Interface Design Document
• The content management team has been adequately staffed with content entry clerks who have been adequately trained in content acquisition.

Completion Criteria

Content personalization is typically complete when the following postconditions hold:

• All required external content has been acquired.
• The retirement phase has started.

Steps

Content personalization typically involves the following teams performing the following steps in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• Content Management Team:
  • Determine the need for new content by reading and understanding the associated:
    • Informational (data) requirements in the:
      • System Requirements Specification
      • Glossary
      • Domain Model Document
    • Information architecture:
      • Information Architecture Document
    • Content design:
      • Database Design Document
      • Human Interface Design Document
• TBD

Techniques

Content personalization can typically be performed using the following techniques:

• TBD

Work Products

Content personalization typically results in the production of the following work products:

• Data Components:
  • Personalized Content:
    • Textual content.
    • Numerical content.
    • Audio content.
    • Graphical content.
    • Video content.
  • Content Metadata permitting personalization.

Guidelines

• Content personalization should be performed iteratively, incrementally, and in parallel with other content management tasks.
• Content personalization is only required for endeavors involving content that needs to be tailored for individual audiences.
• The user should be able to personally perform some of the content personalization.
• The application/website should know what each user has done and where that user is in the performance of his/her tasks. It should react in real-time, based on the user’s actions.
• The more you know the individuals in your audience, the better you can personalize their content.
• Proper performance of the stakeholder profiling and user analysis tasks and the task analysis technique are critical to properly performing content personalization.