In an ideal world (from my clients point of view), every website you visited would open with a screen which asked “Who are you?“. You’d then get a drop-down box of possible professions/sex/ages etc, and then you’d get directed to the relevant site. But this is the real world, and lets face it, that’s just not going to work.

But could there be a compromise?

I’ve come across an online javascript application (here) which takes your browsing history, matches it up against a database - and determines the likelihood of whether you’re male or female (I was apparently 66% female, which I’m not)!

The technology could apparently be elaborated upon, and can even detect the age of the user! But… the whole idea and technology has been patented by Xerox (typical).

But how useful would that be (if not a little presumptuous) if you could select a stylesheet, or landing page depending on whether your user was male, female, under 18 or above… all without asking them! We’ve probably not seen the end of this type of thing, but it’ll not be around for a long time yet!

2 Comments

• You’d be stopping serendipity happening. The true value of the web is that information wants to be free. You can make some broad assumptions about men vs. women, 18 year olds vs. 30 years olds and so on, but they are broad assumptions. Which means that when the 18 year old woman who wants to buy a £25,000 stereo turns up at your site looking for the spec of the connecting wires you may miss a very big opportunity.

  Martin
  Mon 11th August 2008 reply

• This is very true - we’d certainly have to draw a line at how far we push this. But in reality, this is just another (more technical) method of doing what we already do with good IA and user paths.

  Buzz
  Mon 11th August 2008 reply

wanna say something?

If you've got an opinion about Who are you!? - then why not say something? You can even subscribe to these comments via RSS!

Name (required):

Email (required): Put a photo next to your comment!

Do what now?

To put a little photograph of yourself next to your comment, all you have to do is get a 'gravatar'. It's quick to setup, it's free and you can grab one here!

Website:

Comment: