Customization and Personalization in UX: Learn the Difference

There are a few ways you can improve the experience for users in a digital product. Making the experience more unique to each individual is one of them. Almost all the different ways of achieving that can be categorized into two categories: customization and personalization. What are they, and how can they improve UX for a user? Let’s find out.

An experience that is unique to every user is more attractive than a one-size-fits-all general one. Take, for example, Spotify, Apple Music, or Youtube. The content is different according to which user is logged in.

What if all our homepages and suggestions were the same? It would be a lot less exciting. This is what can be changed with customization and personalization. It helps designers and developers create unique experiences for every user.

What is customization?

In customization, we let the user decide what they want to “see”. Human beings love to be in control, therefore this is something they like to do on a product. Let me show you an example.

Let’s take Apple Music. Remember when it asked us to pick our favorite genres and artists? The app still doesn’t know our listening behaviors, therefore it doesn’t know what to suggest to us (that’s personalization, we’ll get to that).

Customization is what happens to the content on the screen due to direct input by the user. Like selecting which genres they listen to the most and hitting next.

Another example is sorting and filtering search results.

If you want to filter out certain results, you would select the criteria to do it. The elements on the screen will then change according to your inputs. This happened due to direct action by the user. Therefore, this is customization.

This is usually a very good implementation since it gives control to the user. But it’s not without its cons.

Some users do not want to put any extra effort to make the experiences unique to them. So you need to make sure you do it at the right time, not overdo it, and how exactly to pull it off. Some users may not even know what they exactly “need”.

So in short, customization is any change that occurs in the experience following a direct input from the user.

What is personalization?

Personalization, on the other hand, happens behind the scenes. The changes in the experience are done by the algorithm and do not require direct input from the user, even though it stems from it.

Let’s go back to our Apple Music example.

After the app decides what to show on your homepage the first time after the onboarding, it doesn’t stay the same.

The music that’s recommended to you changes over time depending on your listening behaviors. But you don’t pick and choose these in a list, it happens backstage. Or in other words, it’s decided by Apple’s algorithm.

These changes that are made from algorithms or by the app itself is part of personalization.

It’s the same when Spotify creates personalized playlists for you based on what you listen to regularly.

Another example of personalization is when Uber Eats shows the restaurants that are closest to you and the ones you “liked” the most first.

It’s better if you get that information without any effort.

Again, just like in customization, there is a good side and a bad side to it.

Let’s dive a little deeper into why making unique experiences are important

Like I mentioned earlier, human beings are a type of species that like to be in control. Psychologist Abraham Maslow once listed a hierarchy of needs for human beings: health, food, and sleep. All of these needs required a fair bit of control — control over the environment to gather food, control over where we find shelter in, and control over our choices to avoid diseases.

This is why users are attracted to that even in digital products. We need to make them feel empowered.

When you personalize an experience, you predict what the user may find important. Rather than seeing a general screen, they will always prefer something that they find meaningful.

A survey by Janrain found out that 74% of customers are frustrated by websites that show content that is not relevant to them or their interests.

Final verdict

In conclusion, both methods have one goal — making a digital product that is unique and meaningful for each user.

There are many ways of achieving this, but as I mentioned earlier, we need to find the right balance.

If we do that, we can make the user feel empowered and in control which makes them more loyal to the product.

Thanks for reading.