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Better User Experience With Hidden Profiles And Autolearn

The concept of hidden profiles is simple. It’s not visible for the site’s users therefore not editable by them.

Let’s say we have a site where visitors can sign up, becoming members of the site. They have the option to edit their personal profile: profile image (avatar), name, email, phone, password, etc.

Now assume that on the site are game reviews. Now we want to give the option for our users to change the font size, line height of the text for better reading and to create a better user experience. Now, it’s a little annoying that every time a user wants to read a game review, he/she has to change the font size.

Of course we can save this value into the session, but why not create a hidden profile and save it there. This way our application can learn users’ behaviour and save these values into the user’s hidden profile. And not just font size, line height, but more complex behaviours for ex. a user each time browses the most popular reviews. Save this value into his hidden profile so next time the most popular reviews show up first.

Although we can give the option to change these values in their personal profile, but then this profile page would be far from simple. Picture 10 – 15 tick buttons on the page each representing a different option.

A good practice though is to give the option to turn off/on this auto learning feature.

Auto learning could be very powerful if handled correctly. For ex. let say we count each time a user changes the text’s font size. And let say after 3 changes we save the font size value into his hidden profile and next time the font would be of this value.

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