Drupal personalisation

Content personalisation is achieved when the content presented to a user is determined by the context of that user, resulting in a better user experience. Context is determined by things such as browsing history, device, time of day, season, location and the task being carried out. Personalisation typically aims to present the next best step for the user which might include relevant content, promotional offers or a call to action. Personalisation can occur at a variety of touchpoints including mobile, website, application, instore, marketing campaign or advertising.

For the user receiving the personalised content the benefit should be more relevant content which helps them discover what they are looking for or to complete the task they are undertaking. The key is to derive the user's intent at the current point of interaction. Making this process faster and easier will lead to a better user experience and more trust and appreciation for the service provider. For the service provider, improvements in usability should lead to improved conversion rates leading to an improved bottom line.

Content personalisation requires the combination of strategy, technology and delivery. A successful content personalisation strategy will involve research, data collection, data processing, supporting content and the means of delivering that content to the user at the right time and place. Content personalisation is as much a user experience problem as it is a technical one. 

It's appropriate, provided it's built around genuine user need rather than tracking for its own sake. For a government site, personalisation typically means surfacing the right service, form, or piece of guidance faster - for example, showing health-professional content differently to a member-of-the-public visitor, rather than building an invasive marketing profile. Privacy-centric personalisation is achievable within standard privacy obligations when it's designed in from the start.

Start with a maturity assessment: understand what data and content structure you already have, identify the highest-value use cases (usually the pages or journeys with the most traffic or the most confused users), and pilot one or two rules before expanding. Personalisation built on top of a well-modelled, component-based site is far easier to introduce incrementally than retrofitting it onto an unstructured one.

Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) with a rich catalog of contributed modules, many of which are able to help with personalising content. Initially personalisation solutions were based around authenticated users. There are many backend modules which allow for integrations with systems such as CRM and marketing tools. As Drupal developed a more decoupled approach solutions evolved for anonymous users, with clientside logic driving the experience.

Drupal personalisation means showing different content, calls to action, or navigation paths to different visitors based on context, such as their role, location, referral source, or where they are in a task, rather than showing every visitor an identical page. It ranges from simple rule-based content swaps through to more advanced, behaviour-driven recommendations.

Drupal provides solid platform for personalising content. Firstly, it is an enterprise grade content management system with 20 years of continuous development and improvement. It is capable of managing and serving the personalised content. Secondly, it ships with RESTful endpoints for serving content in a decoupled was to the frontend of the website, application or instore displays. Thirdly, the contributed module space contains a wide range of modules capable of integrating with third party systems as well as for controlling the logic to display the personalised content.

A personalisation solution relies on strategy, technology and delivery. Drupal helps with the final two, however, a solid strategy is a prerequisite for success. The simplest way to get started with Drupal personalisation is to use modules such as Personified and Smart Content, which are able to take the local state of the user and deliver personalised content through conditional logic or retrieving content from the backend.

Convivial CXP is Morpht's personalisation-enabled Drupal starter, built with privacy-centric personalisation, editor experience, accessibility, and integration in mind from the outset, so personalisation isn't a separate module bolted onto a finished site, but part of the same foundation as the rest of the build.