Aiya101

Oh, MIT. You and the bleeding edge.

Today, MIT’s Technology Review published Adapting Websites to Users–an article about a marketing experiment to increase Web sales by customizing content delivery to user. How? You might ask. By analyzing a user’s first few clicks on the site, matching it with a prescribed cognitive style and then selecting a content delivery format. Eliza would be proud…or at least ask you how you feel about it.

Here’s the thing though. They’re testing it out with British Telecom. I’m taking a wild guess that the main audience for this website isn’t the web savvy millennials or technophiles.

And, as much as I hate to make generalizations, for the point of argument…here we go.

What we come to is a different sort of digital divide. Those who thrive in the digital environment vs. those who carefully pick their way through it (some will say digital natives vs. digital immigrants–for the sake of conciseness, I’ll use those terms). In my experience, many digital immigrants experience the Web in an entirely different way than the natives. Immigrants don’t skip text. I’ve seen people read every single word on a Web page before moving on to the next one. They read the text on pop-ups, come to a screeching halt at any alert message, and print out information from the Web so they don’t lose it. They’re thorough and habitual. They’re uncomfortable with the Web. They need consistency. They have the money and they need consistency.

MIT, you’re gonna frustrate them. What will happen when they click differently, get a new configuration of content, and can’t find that page with the graph that they printed out again? Perhaps this is a subversive plot to boost British Telecom’s business by increasing phone calls from immigrants to natives

I think it’s brilliant to do just-in-time marketing and user-driven content delivery–I’m just not sure the general population is ready for it yet. ThinkGeek instead, MIT. You’re supposed to be pros at that, right?