Is personalization a double-edged sword?

Christian Ricci in this Boxes and Arrows article looks at web personalization and how it can be user to improve user experience.

“Personalization, properly implemented, brings focus to your message and delivers an experience that is visitor-oriented, quick to inform, and relevant. Personalization, poorly implemented, complicates the user experience and orphans content.”

While it does a good job of explaining how personalization can be useful, the article does not go deep into how it complicates matters. Apart from sensitivity to revealing personal information, are there any other impediments? The article does mention an increase in the complexity of the interface, but isn't this just the complexity of setting up the personalization? Does the end-user even have to know about this?

Posted by Navneet at January 14, 2004 11:02 AM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam