In my last post i discussed why personalization is a good thing. In this post i’ll talk about how to implement it.
But first, here are some more reasons for personalization.
- To scroll through a day’s worth of Metro headlines on mobile would take 40 pages on an iPhone5.
- Metro users rarely use the site navigation on mobile – only 2% of visits use it!
Background
My demo from early 2014 shows how a user’s interests can be deduced when the they are shown one headline at a time (a la Metro10). Read the detail in this post.
In fact, this can be generalized to a stream of headlines (a la Metro.co.uk on mobile) and even more complicated desktop layouts.
How it could work
My algorithm relies on knowing if the user has clicked on an article or not.
When there is a stream of headlines, “not” is given when the post scrolls out of view (beyond the top of the viewport).
This works for more complicated desktop layouts too, if you ignore the sidebar (assume that users view the posts in the main column). You may also need to ignore some widgets (e.g. the horizontal trending bar on Metro squeezes 5 posts on one line so users aren’t likely to absorb all of them).
What do you think?