Does Personalization Do Anything Useful?

I interviewed user interface expert Jared Spool a couple of years ago for a now defunct Web site. I really like Jared’s ideas on all things technical, so it was a pleasure to discuss personalization with him.

Another take on personalization from a couple years ago. My favorite bit of the interview:

For Spool, the way to tackle personalization isn’t to start with the question, ?What can we personalize?? The right questions to ask are, ?What does the user need to see right now? What information does the user need??