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What do you mean you didn't tell me you knew what I wanted before I knew?

Jakob Nielsen is an industry icon, having literally written the book on web site usability and customer experience. But he sometimes can be an overly meticulous fool. I get his Alertbox column regularly and today it had this piece:

PERSONALIZATION OFTEN FAILS
Disney recently released the third DVD in the collected series of Donald Duck cartoons. After reading the review in The New York Times, I promptly ordered a copy from Amazon.com.
I had read through Amazon's page of personalized recommendations for me, but it never told me that Donald Duck 3 was out. That's despite the fact that I bought vol. 1 from Amazon when it was released in 2003 and I also bought vol. 2 from them shortly after its release date in 2005.
A customer who bought both vol. 1 and vol. 2 should be an obvious candidate for being told about vol. 3. Especially for something that's only published every two years, so that the customer is unlikely to remember to seek out the product on their own accord. Yet, I had to learn about this new product from reading dead trees that are dumped in my driveway in the morning, not from Amazon's famed personalized recommendations.

What does Amazon care? I bought from them anyway. But that's because I am an exceedingly loyal customer, having bought 521 items there since 1996. Most users are less loyal and could easily have decided to pick up their cartoons elsewhere. (Overly meticulous disclosure: Disney is one of our consulting clients. But I have liked Donald Duck cartoons for 45 years, starting long before I became a usability consultant.)

Wow. This is a case in point of how perfection gets in the way of reality. So the database records for good 'ol Jake on Amazon, which ar 12 years old and have over 521 product entries (not to mention his visits to products, his reviews, if he made any and I have a feeling he believes his opinions count, etc.) failed him. I wonder what recommendations they did show him and how often he actually makes a purchase off a recommendation. He doesn't tell us that. And does he tell us anything about the other 519 products he has purchased that would enable us to imagine what products might be recommended in the too few slots or email blasts he must receive.

He is buying about 3 products monthly on average. And we don't know if he made 250 or 20 purchases since he last bought a Duck cartoon. And what about the margin on a disney cartoon dvd vs the margins on some of the books that might fall into his recommendations? Disney is a good negotiator and is a strong brand. Do you think Amazon wants to push low margin or high margin products?

I imagine Jake would like it if every waiter knew what he wanted to order before he saw the menu and that his analyst would tell him when he was going to have an anxiety attack before he needed to take his xanax. Give it a rest and keep pushing your clients to do more better but ease up on the need for perfection based on your whims. Maybe Jakob just wants to bully Amazon into giving him some freebies.

Been playing in Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn for the business contacts, Facebook for my relatives and some friends and MySpace for bands and music. I also saw one of these on MySpace and wanted to test to see if I could draw it in here - and I can!