User Profiles: How the Higgins Project can prevent mass confusion in mass customization and enable a new generation of virtual identity services

How a new initiative, the HIGGINGS project, wants to give users full control over their profiles, and what this means for better mass customization businesses.

Asked what is the genus of mass customization, I always answer customer co-design. A custom product can only be provided if the manufacturer has specific information about the demands of each particular customer. In most cases, this information is provided by an explicit act of co-design in which customers choose between options or create a configuration within a given solution space.

The problem of mass confusion

This co-design process, however, is also the reason of mass confusion, a reason why consumers often abandon a mass customization purchasing process. Mass confusion has two major reasons:

Burden of choice: One limit of mass customization is that excess variety may result in an external complexity. Users might be overwhelmed by the number of options.
Matching needs with product specifications. In addition, customers often simply lack the knowledge and skills to transfer their personal needs and desires into a concrete product specification. A pair of sport shoes becomes a rather complex product if one has to decide explicitly between different widths, cushioning options for the insole, patterns for the outsole, and color options.

The premier task of the design of co-design toolkits (configurators) is to prevent mass confusion. A premier measure for this is a starting solution so that customers do not have to start from the scratch. In a good mass customization system, there will be a pre-configuration which represents already a full configuration and which customers can modify according to their wishes (the factory121.com web site provides a good example).

To generate starting solutions, manufacturers could present a number of "standard" products (as in the case of Factory121), not connected to the individual customer. An even better way though is to customize also the starting solution according to each customer's preferences: If the Factory121 website would know that I find a particular class of watches ugly, it would present me more choices of other models. It may even present me starting solution with watches in my preferred colors, or those of my wife.

But the prerequisite for customizing the configuration process is that the vendor possesses knowledge about my preferences. If I am a returning customer, this should be the standard situation (coined "learning relationship" by consultants Peppers & Rogers). For first-time customers, however, the provision of a good starting solution is a more challenging task.

Virtual identity: The dream of the universal user profile

The optimal situation would be if the vendor could draw on an existing profile of my preferences, generated by shopping and configuring at other companies in the past, but also fine-tuned by my own feedback and demands. Such a profile would contain information about past purchases, configurations, measurements, allergies, socio-demographical data, and, of course, address and payment data. Another element of such a profile could be my previous search terms at Google and alike, representing the "Database of my intentions", as John Battle has called it in the great book "The Search" .

In short, such a profile would represent my (virtual) identity. This idea of such a unique user profile, representing the identity of a customer, is pretty old and has been discussed many times in the context of personalization and customization. And there were many commercial attempts to generate and manage such a universal user profile, like Firefly, Microsoft passport, or Sun Microsystems-led Liberty Alliance. All failed due to missing trust by users: You may trust Amazon to build such a profile of your media preferences supporting its recommendation engine, but most users do not trust Microsoft to build such a profile for their entire personal lives.

How the Higgings Project can help

At this place, a new project may provide help: The Higgins Project (http://www.eclipse.org/higgins), managed by the Eclipse open source foundation, aims to give people more control over how their personal information is used online and aims to develop so-called 'user-centric' identity management. Rather than big corporations managing identity data, the user-centric identity management approach puts individual users in the driving seat. They shall be able to decide what information they want shared with trusted websites that use Higgins-derived software. The project is supported by a large rooster of companies, including Dell and Microsoft. IBM, Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Novell, and Parity Communications all said they are contributing already code to the project.

As John Leyden reports, Higgins breaks a person's identity into pieces, allowing users to dictate who can access parts of their identity information, within applicable privacy guidelines and laws. Organizations using applications built with Higgins open source tools can share specific identity information, such as their telephone number or buying preferences, according to rules set by the individual.

This set-up will also help users to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple systems. Using service adapters, systems such as directories, collaboration spaces and email systems can be plugged into the Higgins framework. Users thus could change an address across all their online accounts more easily or delegate who can see which parts of their body measurements, for example. The only cross-vendor application working (very successfully, but proprietary and challenged by many constraints) is the Virtual Model from My Virtual Model (Full disclaimer: I am on the board of this company).

The result is a system to manage the digital identity of a user. Digital identity management are seen at the forefront of next generation web services – enabling finally the ideas of personalization and customer centricity we envisioned in our mass customization community for more than a decade.

If Higgins is successful and adopted by mass customizers, this will mean a large boost for mass customization. New research has clearly shown that mass confusion and the burden of choice are major obstacles of mass customization – preventing consumers to adapt this strategy. It would make so much sense to get a 3D body scan, if I could transport this data from one vendor to another, but still owning and controlling the use of this data by myself. And this would be just the beginning.

Identity Mash-Up: A conference on reusing identity profiles and information

The possibilities and business strategies enabled by digital identity management systems like Higgins are explored in the conference Identity Mash-Up at the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School (June 19-21, 2006). A variety of parties – governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial institutions, international agencies, and merchants – will address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and spam, but also new business models building on virtual identity.

In the business track of the conference, several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, IBM, Novell, BestBuy, and MyVirtual Model, will discuss and make public announcements about new products and services, and will demonstrate their next generation identity services. I will attend the conference and will try to report here what I learned!

If you want to participate as well: The full conference will be webcast by Harvard Law School.

More information on HIGGINS can be found at spwiki.editme.com and channelregister.co.uk