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Personalized user experiences

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From: Myron To
Date: May 14, 2020 4:29PM

I've been trying to research if there is any guideline that would tell me
whether or not the following is a failure or not.

My company has designed and built a career website that customizes its
homepage based on the user's job search behavior on the site. That is, if
we find that a job seeker on our site has searched for and viewed a nursing
category job, we assume that person is interested in a nursing career and
cookie that user's browser so that if the user clicks on the home link in
the main navigation, the user is presented with an alternate homepage that
contains nursing career information, instead of generic career information,
which is presented on our default/non-personalized homepage. However, in
reality, the cookie tells the browser to redirect to an alternate homepage
(different URL). The personalized nursing homepage template is very similar
to the default homepage, but the contents, such as text and images, now
present nursing-oriented text and graphics.

I imagine this could be disorienting for some because if there was
something specific on the default homepage that the user wanted to see
again, the user wouldn't be able to find it because it's not on this
redirected page URL. And the user is likely not to notice that the URL
changed or that the user had been redirected to an alternate homepage.

Does this scenario present a WCAG failure? If so, which guideline can I
reference as an argument to my team?

If the URL did not change or redirect to another page, and we simply used a
show/hide condition to swap out images and text, would that pass? I think
of how Amazon customizes their homepage experience based on my past
shopping behavior in order to entice me to buy other similar items, but
their URL doesn't change. Would this type of scenario be acceptable or is
it still disorienting and considered a failure?

Thank you for your input!

*Myron To*
Director, Program Management
m: +1.360.702.9411
<EMAIL REMOVED>

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