One of the underlying themes of many of the sessions at Flash on the Beach was user experience and user interaction. Some of the more compelling examples demonstrated an interative art dispay, responding to visitors as they interact with a microphone or webcam tied to the exhibit. Other examples incorporated images of the visitor etc. The goal is to create an experience which is unique to each person who views it. These experiences may look similar to each other, but still have an element of uniqueness.A further example is one of the more recent Samsung mobile phones, where the UI changes depending on the phone’s environment. For example, during the day you will see clouds, in the evening, stars will appear on the background wallpaper. If signal strength drops, the sky goes dark. Out of the box, each phone is identical, but over a period of time it becomes customized to the owner.The question I find myself asking is how can this be applied to a Web application?We already have some degree of personalization on the web, and many large organizations have vast amounts of customer data at their disposal, which is usually used to target offers and cross sell products to the user. What we are talking about is something more - the explicit purpose is to create an experience, not cross-selling products. There is always the possibility that cross-sell could be worked into something like this, but it shouldn’t be the primary purpose.In many ways the web could potentially allow for much richer customization of applications - you have a lot more data available about your user, both internally (assuming you are some kind of organization with which the user interacts with) and externally (through services such as Flickr, del.icio.us etc).If you look at a site such as the homepage for American Express, you see a background image of some people walking along a beach. Wouldn’t it be cool if it changed depending on my location (so in my case it would be something British… looking out the window, rain would be a good choice!). It could also rotate seasonly, showing snow in winter, green in summer. Why not take it a bit further… why not look at my Flickr account, analyze my tags and determine that I’m interested in Snowboarding - show me a relevant background image. For a company like American Express, you have access to data around my spending - say I regularly spend money in New York - use that information to customise what I see, and perhaps on the side, fill up the page with regional offers.The difficult task is making such customizations meet some basic criteria:

• They must be non-obtrusive. An entire website shouldn’t totally change just because its 11am, any changes should be subtile , leaving the structure of the site and the brand represented relatively intact. As with the art installations highlighted above, each experience should look similar but whilst still being unique. KISS.
• They must not require additional user effort. All of this should happen without the user having to do anything - they can’t be expected to configure any of this or spend the time selecting the content they want to see.

All of this could make for an interesting web… (more…)