Briefs

Self-customizing e-commerce sites can expect higher sales, they say

By Tim Greene , Network World , 05/22/2008

Web sites that automatically customize themselves for each visitor so they come across as more appealing or simply less annoying can boost sales for online businesses by close to 20%, MIT research says.

These sites adapt to display information so everyone who visits sees a version best suited to their preferred style of absorbing information, say the four researchers who write about such sites in "Website Morphing", a paper being published this month in Marketing Science .

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Morphing changes the look and feel of sites, not just content, to suit cognitive styles. For example the balance of pictures and text can be adjusted to appeal to particular users.

The BT experiment assessed subjects' cognitive styles based on four different cognitive-style characteristics, each having two options. The cognitive styles defined whether individuals were readers or listeners, impulsive or deliberative, visual or verbal and leaders or followers.

This assessment was based on their click stream data. When visitors arrived at the site, they faced four options: comparing plans, visiting a virtual adviser, visiting a learning center and visiting a community of users.

The visitors were then presented with sites that could vary based on three characteristics: graphs and pictures vs. text and audio; small or large amounts of information presented; focused content with a few options vs. general content with all options presented.

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