Monday, June 09, 2008

Morphing Web sites


Researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management hope to make websites better at selling products by making them adapt automatically to each visitor, presenting information in a way that complements that person's style of thinking.

The researchers' initial studies show that morphing a website to suit different types of visitors could increase the site's sales by about 20 percent. Sites, such as Amazon.com, provide personalised features, but this is normally done by using the user's profiles or cookies. The Sloan system adapts to unknown users by analyzing each user's pattern of clicks.

Basically the Web site detects a user's cognitive style. It would watch for traits, such as whether or not the user is detail oriented, and morph to complement that style.

Wow, just think if this was applied to modifying Web sites on the fly to cater for the affects of physiological. There is a detailed paper about this development but unless you have a degree in maths I suggest giving it a miss. Dick Stroud

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