A key feature of ATG is personalization. We have had some internal discussion about “scenarios” versus “targeters”, and the appropriate use of each. From the 2007.1 documentation:

How Are Scenarios Different from Targeters?
Several features in the Scenarios module are also available in a different form in the Personalization module. For example, you can set up targeters in the Personalization module that respond to user actions by displaying personalized content on a page or by sending e-mail.
The Scenarios module, however, introduces an element of time to the way you interact with visitors and personalize your site’s content. Scenarios can contain elements that tell the system to wait for a specified period before continuing with the next step; for example, you can have the system identify new members, and then wait three months before sending out a follow-up message. It is primarily this feature that turns a collection of unconnected personalization and targeting activities into a campaign and allows you to choreograph (and therefore better control) the relationship between your visitors and your Web site.
The following guidelines below suggest when to use scenarios and when to use targeters.

• Scenarios are triggered by events. If you want to personalize content as a result of a site visitor’s doing something specific (for example, logging in), use a scenario. Targeters are not event based.
• The business rules you can set up through targeters are more flexible in some cases than scenarios. For this reason, if you need to set up highly complex rules to match content to visitors, use targeters.
• Scenarios use a feature called slots to display dynamic content. Slots provide some powerful advantages over targeters (for example, you can set up empty slots that generate their own requests for content).
• The reporting features of the Scenarios module rely on scenarios to supply data. If you want to use reports to track and analyze business information, you must set up appropriate scenarios.
• As described above, scenarios are time aware. If you want to set up a long-term approach to content and visitor management, use scenarios.

Scenarios and targeters are, however, complementary features. You can use a combination of targeters and scenarios to achieve the results you want.

After our weeks and weeks of training and some hands-on experience, some of us at Resource are looking into the ATG Certification exams. The ATG site has a sample quiz to see if you’re ready for certification. This quiz is a great starting point, as it showcases the type of questions that will be asked, offers feedback on the correct responses and points the visitor to the appropriate reference material. I’ve decided to use this sample quiz as the structure of the study guide I’m creating. The actual exam overview document provided by ATG goes into much more detail, obviously, but this will be a starting point.

This will be something I’ll be doing as I have time, and I will post the link to it from here.

In Jesse’s talk yesterday on Delivering Long-Term Design Value in a Short Term World, he mentioned that typically technology projects are built with data first in mind, then logic, and with UI tacked on top. He stressed the importance of not allowing your thinking to be limited by perceived technological limitations.

For the past few weeks as I’ve sat through ATG training, I’ve tried to be really aware of what ATG has to offer, and how to make its product and feature suite relevant to people in my organization. I’m currently in the business user/management training series, and the needs of this user base are dramatically different than those of the developers. I’ve been trying to think about how to explain ATG and how we can apply it in our work to the different user types.

Last night’s talk had me thinking about this even more. It’s not “ATG” that will sell, it’s what it offers the client. The whole premise of personalization and customization directly contributes to a better user experience, but using ATG for a site doesn’t inherently make for a better experience. It’s a means to an end, and all the tasks associated with determining user needs/wants/motivation still need to take place.

I’ve mentioned before that ATG is a technological platform that really is looking to meet a strategic need. Its standard implementation is rules-based, which is that layer of logic discussed yesterday. I think the challenge is that often from a UX standpoint, we want to achieve a certain result, without too much concern of the “how”. After the talk last night, someone mentioned pandora radio to me as an example of a personalized user experience with that “wow” factor. There is definitely an element of magic involved, which arguably makes the experience even more compelling. The average visitor doesn’t have to know how it works.

I feel that way about training, to some extent. For many of our creative or managerial types, they don’t need to know the intricacies of the platform, they just need to recognize the implications. Like any sort of personalization or customization, it’s about catering the message to the individual and satisfying his needs, to ensure he has a positive perception of what’s in front of him. There’s no need to overwhelm him with too much detail: it’s all about the “beautiful, elegant solution that works”

the challenges with learning about the entire product suite for ATG is that there is LOT there! Campaign optimizer, customer intelligence — there are plenty of ways to gather lots of data on user behaviour, to perform analysis and enhance the user experience. I think it’s really compelling.

The challenge is our role in the site development/enhancement/maintenance. I would say that much of this information would be of business relevance for the company for whom we’re doing the work. Would they be the ones therefore to be using these tools, or is that a service we would offer?

Before class started this morning, I was chatting with an Information Architect and a Business Analyst, and we were talking about how much of this needs to be supported by formal business needs. While we may try to tease that information from the client, there is a question of how much we should be influencing their overall business strategy.

I think what we need to do is really be careful about how we can leverage what ATG offers to meet our client’s needs. As I mentioned earlier, we really do need to be sure we’re aware what functionality is included in which product. While it does appear that the scenario engine is the driver of the entire system, and we could manually build in the functionality we’re looking for, we will need to be conscious of the costs and benefits associated with each product.

Anytime there has been a question if ATG can do what we want, we’re told that it can. Well, it’s built off java, so really it can support anything java can, it’s just a question of whether or not it is OOTB or if we must customize or extend.

A little information can be a dangerous thing, and I know I will have to be careful not to be too agreeable about what we CAN do without considering the time and effort involved in it…

Today I’m sitting in the “Using ATG Scenarios - Driving Customer Loyalty Using ATG Scenario Personalization” training class. I caught the tail-end of “Exploring ATG Technology - Solving Business Problems and Maximizing ROI Using ATG Solutions” and I have to say, it’s quite interesting to be sitting in a class with the different business users. Their questions are moreso of the “can we” nature rather than “how do we”.

Last week I was in the developer training course for setting up content administration, so I was familiar with the interface the class is using. However, I won’t be in Commerce training until next week, so some of the more advanced functionality is new. I will be eager next week to see how we manage to achieve some of what my colleagues requested.

I’m glad I did some additional reading on my own, when some questions arose about affinity selling, I was able to ask if that was related to the ATG purchase of CleverSet. I appreciate that we’re learning everything ATG has to offer, but I’m trying to be particularly conscious of what functionality is related to which version or module. In fact, when there was a question about affinity selling coming from CleverSet integration, the instructor acknowledged that he wasn’t sure in which version of ATG it was incorporated; if it was in 2007.1, or would be coming in the next release.

We looked briefly at promotions and coupons, which I had a personal interest in. The other day I purchased roadId online, and was given a “thank you code” that could be used up to 20 times within the next 30 days. As online coupons become increasingly shared on sites like dealcatcher or even on message boards, I understand the need to limit the number of times a particular discount can be applied. As we were talking about the difference between a promotion and a coupon, I asked if this sort of limitation was supported by default on a promotion. (You can specify limits on a single user’s participation in a given promotion). The instructor said this was not a built-in field, but a scenario could be written to support this business rule. Shortly thereafter we were discussing coupons, and I wondered if perhaps that was a better object on which to enforce this limitation. Some of my colleagues and I were discussing the equivalence in the real world: for a discount, you wouldn’t turn away the 501st person to walk in the door, but on the other hand, you could prevent users from photocopying or reproducing a coupon. I don’t know that that really clarified anything for me in my head, but it was something to think about.

Some of my colleagues had some other intriguing questions: could we ensure that the recipient of the coupon is the one to redeem it? Again, the instructor said it was possible we could build this into a scenario. It sounds as though the redemption rules will be quite involved!

I guess I see the limitations on the usage of a particular promotion (coupons?) as an attribute of that specific element itself, not really part of a scenario (which I associate with user or system behaviour). As I mentioned, my coupon code for buying my RoadId is ThanksAndrea357853. It has particular rules governing its usage. If I do a google search on roadId coupons, I an find other such codes (ThanksKim357919, ThanksDoug330021). The basic rules for the promotion are the same (20 users, 30 days), although the start and end dates are different.

As I write this, I realize I really don’t understand the difference between a coupon and a promotion, unless a coupon is simply a means to a particular instance of a promotion…Ok, after re-reading the chapter about promotions and coupons, I think I understand the distinction. A coupon is just a trigger, like a scenario, that allows for the promotion to go into effect. That’s why you would set the limits on the promotion (i.e. number of times it could take place). However, whereas a disabled scenario would be invisible to the user, you would have to account for some error checking in the case of the attempt to use an invalid coupon.

Today was our day off after 9 days of ATG training. Yesterday afternoon, we were all mentally “full” of all we’d been learning. I wasn’t sure how productive I’d be at work today.. and as it turned out, it was one of those great days where you just can’t get enough done!

The morning started somewhat slow, but we had a major meeting scheduled from 11-12:30 for an upcoming project in which we’re to flex our new ATG skillz. The meeting went really well, we went over the strategic and creative briefs before getting into some more technical details.
Because I’m trying to get into an IA role, I was really excited about dissecting the tiny pieces that went into what we saw on the screen. For me, IA isn’t just about sitemaps and wireframes. I come to it from a programmer’s perspective: so what different objects make up the site; what are the properties of each.

techie minds at work

After the formal meeting, several developers and our director were chatting about templates, and all of a sudden I got what was described as an overwhelmed look on my face. I was thinking about templates on two levels: templates that referred to data: mapping a template to a particular type of content, and then templates as they related to presentation. The scribbling to the right was my attempt to get some of this stuff out of my head: we could describe an object (say, a press release) as an aggregate of its parts: title, description, accompanying image(s), accompanying link(s). There could be a generic template used for this type of content, with variations based on the existence of different aspects of the element. Still, the underlying template would be of a press release.

But a template could also be used to vary presentation: a template could use the same attributes of a press release, but vary in terms of its orientation (image on the right versus the left). Where does the specification of this lie? Is it on the level of an individual instance (press release 1 could have the left-hand images, press release 2 could have the right-hand images), or should there be consistency across item types. (My personal thought is that for optimal user experience, items of similar types should be displayed in a similar fashion).
It’s like the post I had not long ago about areas of variation, or all the common UI building blocks discussions we had at LexisNexis. It’s about building a web application, not a web site.

After our group pow-wow, I still had all these questions on my mind, and I cheerily sat down to go through the wireframes. I tried to identify major item types, trying to consider all the information I’d taken in over the last few weeks. One major consideration is content updates, and I think sitting in training on the managerial track next week will help me understand what tools we need to provide for people to achieve their goals. (granted, we’re talking about my colleagues, who work at an interactive agency. We all have an abnormally high familiarity with the web, so we’re not indicative of a typical client)

I’m not the architect on the project, but I can’t help but see how the various pieces will fit together. I have a strong opinion on tying together semantically related content: an individual page describes a particular item, it is not simply a group of “stuff”. The challenge is looking across items to figure out how the compare and contrast. In training I asked about the possibility for a slot to be populated with different types of media — an image, a video. The response was that a slot can only contain a single item type: but the solution is to make a generic enough “type” that all media can be supported. I want us to see these patterns from the outset, rather than pigeon-holing ourselves into having unique, un-extensible content scattered throughout.

I’m really looking forward to this process…

Today was the first day of Dev2 Training for ATG. While the class members were the same, we had a different instructor. This course is quite streamlined: we were supposed to cover 4 or 5 chapters today, and three tomorrow. The instructor started us off with a review of DEV1. Initially I thought that this would be catered towards groups that had taken DEV1 some time prior, but as it turned out, we all realized there was plenty that had not yet sunk it!
It was very interesting to have a different instructor; he explained things differently and I really felt that aided us all in seeing the concepts in a different way. It was evident that he has been instructing the information for quite awhile, as he was very careful to ensure we were all aware of the rationale for each lecture, each exercice. Although we only plodded through three chapters today (slower than the instructor’s anticipation, and much slower than we went through the material last week), I believe the entire class felt like we had an overall better sense of what we were learning.

Some of what we looked at today was related to User, Roles and Organizations, and mapping many:many relationships. These are not everyday dev tasks, but I’m glad to get a chance to familiarize myself with these aspects of the system.

Resource Interactive and ATG Alliance to Offer Comprehensive, Online Shopping Experience

Resource Interactive, an independent digital marketing agency renown for its revolutionizing consumer insights, and ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG), whose top-ranked e-commerce suite powers more top online sellers than any other, today announced enhanced partnership capabilities. Together the two companies will provide a complete online user experience design solution for retailers, consumer packaged goods and manufacturers—including strategy, creative, ATG technical integration and ongoing maintenance and support.
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With this announcement, Resource Interactive further increases its commitment to the ATG platform with its largest concentrated training and certification effort for the platform to date.

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Complementing ATG’s leadership in the e-commerce space, the Resource Interactive thought leadership platform will enable clients to further benefit from ATG’s full suite of services.”

source: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080306/20080306005955.html?.v=1

Today was one of those up and down days– this morning as we went through chapters on “scenarios” and “delivering personalized content”, I was very excited, eagerly sending off notes to co-workers on how this could enhance our offerings. By the afternoon I was glaring at my monitor, able to see why things weren’t working (”the “Views an item from SongsRepository” event isn’t being triggered”) with absolutely no idea how to fix them.

But I suppose that’s what experience is for, right? It’s not meant to be that easy..

Once again, I felt very fortunate to be attending training with 10 of my co-workers; I feel the shared experiences will definitely add up to be worth