Personalisation and differentiation in internal business applications

Personalisation and differentiation is a big umbrella, it addresses the fact that there is no single user, there are many different users with different skill levels and there are various ways they like to work. In essence business application designers work under similar constraints to consumer product designers, designing standard items for a mass market, each member of which sees themself as an individual.

This means you have to build a standard item which can accommodate the needs and wants of a range of people. These are the prime areas you need to consider in your internal business applications:

1. Role based personalisation. Varying application access and information presentation depending on the user roles.
2. Skill based personalisation. Allowing for different skills and experience. The user community is a broad thing; it covers the newbie, regular users and power users. The same applications need to accommodate all of these. We need to make the application intuitive, obvious and helpful to the newbie while giving the power user fast track methods like navigation and keyboard shortcuts. Meet these needs and the regular users are satisfied as well.
3. Working practice personalisation. For example: some users will only want to work in a single window; some user will use multiple browser tabs; some users will want to use multiple windows and some users will want to use combinations of these. Again, some people like to work with on screen reports, some people will insist on printed reports, so they must get options. You may be able to allow your users to customise their own home page with useful productivity widgets. There’s a lot of little things you can design in which helps people customise their workspace.

In summary, there are three prime types of personalisation to consider in business applications: role based personalisation, skill based personalisation and working practice personalisation. Get this right, as far as you can, and you’ll make better business applications with happier users.