Every December the industry produces a landslide of predictions, most of which are safe bets dressed up as insight. I am wary of adding to the pile, so rather than list ten things I will pin my colours to one theme I think ties a lot of this year’s changes together: we are reaching the end of treating every visitor the same.
For most of the web’s life, a website was a fixed thing. Everyone who arrived saw the same homepage, the same offers, the same copy, regardless of who they were or how they had found you. That made sense when we did not have the data or the tools to do anything else. We increasingly do, and the pressure to actually use it is going to build through next year.
The clearest driver is mobile. It has stopped being a side channel and become, for many sites, most of the traffic. Someone on a phone on a train has different needs and a different patience than someone at a desk, and serving them an identical experience is starting to look like a missed opportunity rather than a neutral default. I expect a lot of 2014 to be spent, frankly, catching up on mobile experiences that should already have been better. Responsive design has given us the mechanism; the harder work of rethinking what a phone visitor actually wants is still ahead for most people.
Alongside that, the tools for tailoring what people see are getting more accessible. Personalisation used to be an enterprise luxury involving expensive platforms and a lot of consultants. It is creeping down towards the rest of us, and I think next year is when more ordinary businesses start experimenting with showing returning visitors something different from first-timers, or matching the landing page to the campaign that sent someone rather than dumping everyone on a generic homepage.
I will add a note of caution to my own prediction, because I have seen personalisation done badly and it is worse than nothing. When it is clumsy, it tips into the slightly creepy, following people around with the product they already looked at until they are sick of it. The businesses that get value from this next year will be the ones that use the data to be more useful rather than more intrusive, and that line is easier to describe than to hold.
There is a bigger question underneath all of this that I do not have a tidy answer to. As experiences get more tailored to the individual, the shared, predictable web we all learned to market to becomes a bit less shared and a bit harder to reason about. What “the homepage” even means gets fuzzier when everyone might be seeing a different one. I do not know yet whether that makes our jobs more interesting or just more complicated, and I suspect 2014 is when we start to find out.
