Customization vs. Personalization

Even though this is not in common use, we might use the term “individualization” to refer to cases where the user experience is adapted to each individual user’s needs. In the early days of computing, this was not done: everybody got the same. Similarly, in the early days of the Web, any given page always looked the same, no matter who was visiting.

Now, it’s common to adapt to individual users, so that different people see different screens, both in application design and in Web design. The two main ways to individualize the user experience differ, depending on the party that initiates the adaptation: