Create Personalization Trays

Enabling User Personalization on your site

The User Personalization engine is category-driven. Set up a library of categories for the site to power user personalization across apps and device platforms. 

How the feature works

You can set up a User Personalization screen based on categories during the user onboarding flow. See image below. 

And if users want to change preferences later, the modal dialog can be evoked from the Personalization section on the user's Account Settings page. When the data is saved, the frontend site sends this data to the Recommendation API. This API will dynamically generate "personalized trays" and show content suggestions on them based on the categories a user has selected.

This feature is part of our premium platform offering. Please talk to your project manager who can discuss the details.

Configuration Step 1: Curate categories & add images

1. Decide the categories you want to show in the User Personalization screen. 
   Remember: User Personalization trays are category-based which means contents are populated based on a category that you assigned to a video. . To improve the relevance of suggested content, ensure that videos are accurately tagged with relevant categories, and remove irrelevant and duplicate categories.
   
   
2. You can update the image for the Category under Content > Library > Admin > Category > Select the Category.  Click on the south-facing chevron arrow on the right rail of the category to open the Manage Images module and then update the 1:1 Square (1080*1080) image.

4. To show the title in the User Personalization screen, under Type, select Visible, and click the --> UPDATE key to save.
   Uncheck the Visible checkbox to remove a category from the modal.

Update image of an existing category

1. Go to APPCMS > Settings > Recommendation > Personalization Categories.
2. Remove the Category (e.g. Fishing) from the Personalization Categories for which you would like to update the image.
3. Go to Content > Admin > Category and update the new image of the desired category.
4. Click on Update after updating the image.
5. Go to  APPCMS > Settings > Recommendation > Personalization Categories and re-add the Category in the Personalization Categories that you have removed earlier.
6. Publish the Settings page.

Configuration Step 2: Set categories on AppCMS

Set the personalization categories correctly in the order you want to display on the User Personalization screen. If the thumbnails appear broken on the site, re-add the images in Content>Library>Admin>Category and update and then re-add the categories to the Personalization Categories here.

Configuration Step 3: Configure User Personalization Tray Module

The User Personalization Tray module is pre-engineered to provide suggestions based on the Categories selected by a user during sign-up or later. When you add the module to a page in the Template Builder and publish, it will dynamically generate personalization trays on the user/frontend side.

Edit User Personalization required screen details

Screen element	Description
Title	Title of the tray. Example, User Personalization Adventure The tray name will automatically generate the category name (Adventure here) as added in the AppCMS Settings.
Tray Type	Personal - show recommendations based on personalized content (User Watch History). Popular - show recommendations based on content popularity. The AWS PERSONALIZE system will fetch the watch data from Redshift and show popular content for unsigned-in users.
Content Type	Choose the content type- Series, Video, Article, or Any that you want to display in the Recommendation Tray.
Fetch Strategy	Choose a fetched strategy. Continue Watching: recommendations using the "Continue Watching" data. Watched History: recommendations based on the user Watch History info. Note: Although it won't impact recommendation results, Fetch Strategy is currently not used for the Recommendation API. You can configure Tray Type as the content fetch strategy.
Limit	Users can select any of the categories they're interested in for personalized content, but to help with screen loading times, you may want to control how many of those selections appear on a single page. So even if one User Personalization Tray module is added to a page and a user has selected 3 categories, 3 personalization trays will be displayed on the front end.  And if a user has 6 personalization selections, more than you want to display, use the 'Limit' field to set the maximum number of trays to show.            Each personalization selection will generate an individual row

Click Publish to publish the changes to the user frontend. 

Notes

- Personalization and Recommendation are two different functionalities. You cannot filter the Recommendations Tray Module by Category or Tag, however, you can add the User Personalization Tray Module to generate dynamic data based on Categories.

- Want to know how many users have selected each personalization category? Our Support team can help provide a custom report on the category counts.

Edit Personalization Screen Text

The screen messaging in the Personalization screen can be edited from Template Builder > Global Settings > Generic Messages > User Recommendation fields. See the illustration below.

Related topic

User Preference Screen

Personalization and Recommendations