Putting personalization into practice

ABSTRACT

The N24 Web site [6] belongs to a network of sites operated by Kirch Group that complement associated television stations in Germany. The relaunch of the N24 site focuses on tighter integration with the N24 cable news brand, targeting managers in need of accurate real-time information delivery in the areas of investing, business, politics, and sports. The goals of personalization [5] include creating a one-to-one relationship with existing customers; providing direct access to personally relevant news; seamlessly integrating with the existing infrastructure, including content and its classification; and collecting information about user interests for driving cross-channel customer relationship management (CRM) activities.<BR><BR>From the perspective of a registered user, the N24 site offers a "My News" section on the N24 home page (see Figure 1) that provides a personalized selection of "Top Five" news headlines with direct links to the respective full-text versions of news items. This news selection is dynamically updated in real time as users interact with the N24 site.

REFERENCES

• 1: Fink, J. User Modeling Servers: Requirements, Design, and Implementation. Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Essen, Germany, 2002 (forthcoming).
• 2: Josef Fink , Alfred Kobsa, A Review and Analysis of Commercial User Modeling Servers for Personalization on the World Wide Web, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.10 n.2-3, p.209-249, 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1026597308943]
• 3: Tim A. Howes , Gordon Good , Mark Smith, Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services, Alpel Publishing, 1998
• 4: humanIT Dynamic Personalization Server (2002); www.humanit. com/en/products/dps
• 5: Alfred Kobsa , Jürgen Koenemann , Wolfgang Pohl, Personalised hypermedia presentation techniques for improving online customer relationships, The Knowledge Engineering Review, v.16 n.2, p.111-155, March 2001 [doi>10.1017/S0269888901000108]
• 6: N24 Online (2002); www.n24.de (in German).

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Human Factors