My Bank’s App is a mess.

I do use the App regularly, in fact very regularly. But 99% of the time, I use it to transfer funds. And the rest 1% time for everything else.

But here is what my homepage looks like:

I would have been happier if I did not have to click a few times to make my transfers.

Showing me these many icons just do not make sense. All I do as soon as I visit the App is look for that one icon and my mind pretty much ignores the rest.

I wonder if it is the ideal experience for me?

But with my Product Manager hat on, I also often think of what I would have done if I managed this product.

As Product Managers, and UX people, we need to think about the user and that's ideally the paramount concern we are supposed to focus on. But we cannot deny that our salaries are paid by our companies and our organizations have their own priorities.

So more often than not, we end up trying to find the middle ground.

The balance between user priorities and organizational priorities is a pain that every product manager shares. And it surpasses the boundary of industry, domain, and customers.

Learning this balancing act is paramount to the success of a Product.

Whether you analyze today’s market using Porter's theory, or Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory, both would agree that the world is moving towards User Experience being the paramount factor of differentiation. In the world of too many, the balance of the bargaining power shifts considerably towards the users.

I strongly believe that the era of UX 2.0 has already started.

But there is a long way to user's Personalized bubble.

The road is long and too drastic to be measured in days, the technology too nascent and the focus too low.

But I also strongly believe that the road can be covered small distances at a time.

Adaptive User Experience is the next step towards the end goal of Uber Personalized User Experience.

It is simple enough to be implemented right now. It is supported by the existing technology. All that is needed is for organizations to get their ducks in a row.

Adaptive User Experience — The Idea

Most users, like me, use a few product features more often than others.

The Pareto Principle might or might not apply because those features might not be the same.

But what would definitely apply is segmentation.

What is possible is to identify a few personas and map them to a group of features that they are likely to use. If you are a fan of the famous collaborative filtering, that's another way to think of it.

Once you are able to identify the known N personas and the set of X features they are likely to use, it would be way more convenient for users to be aware of just those X features.

Let me give you an example following my Bank’s application I highlighted in the beginning.

I belong to the persona who primarily uses the App for funds transfers.
My friend might belong to the persona who primarily uses Funds Transfers, Bill payments, mobile recharge.

Showing users what they are likely to use reduces cognitive overload significantly.

But…

Would that not reduce users’ engagement with other features?

Probably.
Can we not evaluate how likely the user will interact with the feature anyway?

But …

Would that not increase the added implementation for multiple User Experiences?

Probably. Most likely.

But users will be thankful for it.

What Will It Take To Implement?

User Understanding And Analytics

The idea would no doubt need a lot of insights into your customers and a lot of validation and analytics.

User behavior patterns must be deeply understood, and not by the naked eye but by powerful algorithms to make this successful.

Experience Bundles for Persona Groups

Experience Bundles provides a packaged User Experience consisting of speacially designed features that each persona group is likely to use.

Experience Bundles would be a near-ideal mechanism to allow a great user experience of the features that the target user is likely to use. The mechanism would greatly reduce the cognitive overload and make the Products way more intuitive.

Ideal User Experience requires near-zero focus of customers using the feature they desire.