When Everything is Personalized, Nothing Feels Personal
#011: Designing for human resonance in the age of infinite customization.
There’s something strange about using the internet today.
You open a shopping app, and it recommends exactly what you bought last week. Your music feed queues up songs you’ve already heard. Your news homepage rearranges itself to match your known interests. Your email, your ads, your entire digital environment — all tuned to you.
And yet, it all feels… impersonal.
This is the paradox of personalization. The more we optimize for individual relevance, the more we risk stripping out the texture of shared experience — the messy, emotional, human qualities that make an experience feel designed rather than assembled.
The Fragmented Self
Personalization has become a default strategy in digital product design. Tailored content, predictive algorithms, dynamic interfaces — these tools are meant to improve engagement, efficiency, and relevance which they often do. But they also splinter the experience.
Two people can visit the same homepage and see entirely different things. This is powerful in theory, but in practice it can dissolve any sense of cohesion or context. You’re no longer part of a community exploring something together. You’re in a private simulation, reinforced by your own click history.
Even in retail, this shows up in subtle but critical ways. A homepage optimized for product discovery might be overwritten by recent utility tasks such as your previous order, a “start shopping again” prompt, a generic coupon carousel. Efficient? Sure. But where’s the invitation? The spark? The chance to be surprised, delighted, or emotionally connected to the brand?
Personalization is Not Empathy
One of the biggest myths in product design is that personalization is inherently empathetic. That because we’re tailoring something to an individual, we’re understanding them better.
But empathy isn’t about predicting behavior, it’s about seeing people clearly. Understanding their needs, desires, frustrations and then designing experiences that connect with them on more than a transactional level.
When personalization becomes purely behavioral as a mirror of past actions, it stops being empathetic and starts being reductive. People are more than the sum of their clicks.
What Shouldn’t Be Personalized?
It’s time to ask a harder question: What shouldn’t we personalize?
There are parts of an experience that benefit from consistency, shared structure, and human judgment. These include:
Brand expression and storytelling. A homepage or app shell should anchor users in a shared sense of place and identity, not vanish behind dynamic modules.
Navigation patterns. Personalizing navigation may seem helpful, but it often leads to confusion, especially when common paths become buried.
Emotional moments. Onboarding, celebration, and closure points benefit from crafted experiences — not automated ones.
Content with cultural weight. News, editorial picks, promotions, even design themes — these are moments where a designer’s or editor’s perspective can create connection, rather than deferring to a data model.
Personalization isn’t inherently bad, but when everything is filtered through an engagement algorithm or platform logic, the result can be emotionally flat and eerily isolating.
Where Design Still Matters
Designers have a critical role to play here: not just in what we optimize, but in what we protect.
We can preserve shared surfaces where people see the same thing — a homepage, a nav bar, a splash experience — and feel grounded in something communal.
We can establish clear boundaries for what gets personalized and what stays curated, branded, or emotionally intentional.
We can design for serendipity, not just efficiency. Surprise is a form of value.
We can humanize the scaffolding using storytelling, motion, and visual continuity to make even dynamic experiences feel warm and connected.
And we can do all this without rejecting personalization outright. The goal isn’t to go backward. It’s to move forward with care and to remember that a personal experience isn’t the same as a meaningful one.
One Last Thought
As design systems, content platforms, and server-driven UI grow in sophistication, it becomes easier than ever to fragment the interface and harder to make it feel whole.
That’s our challenge now:
To create systems that scale personalization without sacrificing soul, because the most powerful digital experiences aren’t the ones that know us best. They’re the ones that see us and still invite us into something bigger than ourselves.