How Close Are We To An Adaptive Web?

Technologists have spent nearly 20 years now predicting the future of the Web. And while the Web is not dead yet, how we use it and our expectations of it are surely changing. We want what we want exactly when and where we want it. And when we don’t get it, we don’t hesitate taking our business – or eyeballs – elsewhere.

This has led more technologists including myself to start thinking about how the Web needs to evolve to keep up with user expectations. People hold companies to impossibly high expectations to deliver extremely personalized experiences as they browse, shop, learn and play on the Web.

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The Adaptive Web: The Future of the Online Experience

Previous attempts at personalizing and optimizing online experiences have struggled to give consumers what they want. That’s because they’ve been focused on drawing conclusions about our intent based on our past behaviors or purchases or compiling more data on peoples’ social graphs. And while user profiles can tell us a lot of things, 1) they’re quickly outdated, and 2) they do a very poor job in helping us figure out what people really want and need in the moment.

What we need is to build a smarter approach that allows companies to adapt to their customers’ needs in real-time.

The concept of collective intelligence, which I’ll address a little further down below, will be critical to achieving this vision–something I like to think of as an “adaptive Web.” That is, a digital experience that is always relevant and based on users’ current intent and interests. It also must be device-agnostic, especially important given the increased mobility of the online experience — a challenge analyst firm Forrester calls “the Splinternet.”

In an adaptive Web scenario, the Web will truly come to life and become self-learning. We’ll see the Google way of determining linkages between sites and content go by the wayside in favor of an approach that’s based entirely on what the Web community at large and like-minded users within it found useful.

An adaptive Web experience would represent a dramatic shift in how we interact with the Web (or more accurately, how the Web interacts with us). Let me explain.

What An Adaptive Web Would Look Like:

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Vail with some old college buddies. So you hop on to Expedia to buy plane and hotel tickets. On checkout, you’re suddenly alerted to a winter jacket sale at REI.com based on the Web community’s affinities between Vail and buying ski jackets. No hard coding necessary.

After you get your jacket you then visit the Vail Ski Resort homepage, which is automatically optimized to show you the best trails because it knows you’re already headed there (and thus need no persuading why Vail is the best place on Earth to visit!). Later that night you search for “Sushi in Vail” on your iPhone and the top search results are all restaurants by your Vail hotel that are open on the days of your trip.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. At some point, we could see a time when not only your Web experience is adaptive, but also your social connections – based merely on your current intent and interests. For example, in the scenario above you could also be temporally linked with people who are going to Vail at the same time or who live in your area. This would have numerous benefits: you could share travel trips, ask them to carpool with you to save gas, or meet up for sushi at that restaurant you just discovered.

But creating an experience like this requires much more than machine learning and advanced algorithms. It requires a deeper understanding of how the human brain works.

Next page: Changing the Status Quo: No Easy Task

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