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Enhancing the performance of ionic conductivity for solid-state electrolytes: an effective strategy of injecting lithium ions within anionic metal–organic frameworks

Chem. Commun., 2024, 60,13416-13419
DOI: 10.1039/D4CC04515G, Communication
Lu Shi, Xin Wang, Zhiliang Liu
An ionotropic MOF (Li+[Cu-BTC]) with lithium ions in the pores of the lattice was synthesized, which displays outstanding lithium ionic conducting properties over a wide temperature range.
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Enhanced glucose-responsivity of PBA–diol hydrogel networks by reducing crosslink affinity

Mol. Syst. Des. Eng., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4ME00106K, Paper
Open Access
Sijie Xian, Yuanhui Xiang, Svenja Deichmann, Matthew J. Webber
New diol chemistries are explored for insulin delivery from glucose-responsive hydrogels comprised of dynamic-covalent crosslinking interactions between phenylboronic acids and diols.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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Self-supervised graph neural networks for polymer property prediction

Mol. Syst. Des. Eng., 2024, 9,1130-1143
DOI: 10.1039/D4ME00088A, Paper
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Qinghe Gao, Tammo Dukker, Artur M. Schweidtmann, Jana M. Weber
Self-supervised learning for polymer property prediction in scarce data domains.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Hallmarks of great works




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Circularly polarized Room-Temperature Phosphorescence enhanced by Dynamic Cross-linked Networks fixation

New J. Chem., 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4NJ00510D, Paper
Bochun Wang, Yuzhan Li, ChangLi Zhang, Sirong Sun, Wanli He, Dong Wang, Hui Cao, Zhou Yang
Organic ultra-long room temperature phosphorescence (OURTP) has been widely used in applications including encryption and anti-counterfeiting. However, few research has focused on circularly polarised luminescence (CPL) with RTP materials. In...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Metal–organic frameworks constructed using acid–base mixed ligands, carboxylic acids and N-containing chalcone, and their catalytic performance for Knoevenagel condensation

New J. Chem., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D3NJ05164A, Paper
Limin Cheng, Junyong Zhang, Caihong Zhan, Hao Xu, Chunhua Gong, Jingli Xie
MOF materials constructed using acid–base mixed ligands serve as efficient and economical porous heterogeneous catalysts for Knoevenagel condensation.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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Nanopolyhedral Zn/Fe-NC derived from bimetallic zeolitic imidazole frameworks as an efficient catalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction in an air-cathode microbial fuel cell

New J. Chem., 2024, 48,7092-7101
DOI: 10.1039/D3NJ05279F, Paper
Qianwu Wang, Jingzhao Lu, Songlin Liu, Boqu Yu, Bolong Liang
The synergistic effect of Zn, N and moderate Fe doping enhances the ORR performance. The maximum power density of the Zn/Fe-NC-0.5 MFC is 1954 ± 20 mW m−2.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Design of Fe and N co-decorated biomass-derived hierarchical porous carbon frameworks with boosted oxidase-like activity for hydroquinone detection

New J. Chem., 2024, 48,7197-7204
DOI: 10.1039/D4NJ00509K, Paper
Han Zhang, Xiaodan Qi, Zhifei Wang, Lihua Jin, Yehua Shen
An Fe and N co-decorated biomass-derived porous carbon framework with boosted oxidase-like activity was prepared and applied to sensitive hydroquinone detection.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks with extended conjugate systems for boosted photocatalytic degradation

New J. Chem., 2024, 48,7213-7224
DOI: 10.1039/D4NJ00610K, Paper
Xiaojuan Bai, YiLin Xin, Tianqi Jia, Linlong Guo, Wei Song, Derek Hao
A schematic mechanism of the photocatalytic degradation process of SMX by solvothermal synthesis of hydrogen-bonded organic framework materials.
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Highly radiation-resistant Al-MOF selected based on the radiation stability rules of metal–organic frameworks with ultra-high thorium ion adsorption capacity

Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4EN00076E, Paper
Xiaofan Ding, Zhanjun Zhang, Xinyan Li, Ke Ma, Tiantian Jin, Zhaoning Feng, Tian Lan, Jing Zhao, Songtao Xiao
Al-MOF synthesized based on MOF irradiation stability rules exhibits high stability against β-irradiation and ultra-high thorium adsorption capacity, which proves its huge potential application value in the field of radionuclide adsorption.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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Two multifunctional Dy(III)-based metal–organic frameworks exhibiting proton conduction, magnetic properties and second-harmonic generation

CrystEngComm, 2024, 26,2033-2042
DOI: 10.1039/D4CE00065J, Paper
Ya-Qing Liao, Tian-Zheng Xiong, Kang-Le Xie, Huan Zhang, Jun-Jie Hu, He-Rui Wen
Two novelty Dy-MOFs were synthesized using H4DTTP-2OMe ligand. MOF 1 displays a more superior proton conductivity, field-induced single molecule magnets behavior and obvious second-order nonlinear optical properties.
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Extended isomerism in heteronuclear metal-organic frameworks: synthetic strategies and crystal structures of lanthanide-cobalt-oxydiacetate systems

CrystEngComm, 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4CE00168K, Paper
Fernando Igoa, Agustín López Cabrera, Javier Gonzalez-Platas, Leopoldo Suescun, Carlos Kremer, Julia Torres
Here, we present the synthesis and crystal structure of a series of heteronuclear metal-organic frameworks, which consists of cobalt(II) and lanthanide(III) ions or yttrium(III), connected by oxydiacetato (oda2-) as ligand....
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Ionic liquid-functionalized metal organic frameworks and their composite membranes for enhanced proton transport

CrystEngComm, 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4CE00186A, Highlight
Jeong Hwa Song, Seyoung Koo, Dong Won Kang
Post-synthetic modification is gaining prominence as a highly effective strategy for enhancing the functionality of porous materials without significant structural changes. Recently, there is growing interest in research focusing on...
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Facile syntheses, structures and photocatalytic properties of 3D iodoargentate frameworks derived from TM-flexible-amino-ligand templates

CrystEngComm, 2024, 26,2172-2179
DOI: 10.1039/D4CE00247D, Paper
Yan Gao, Xiao Yang, Taohong Ren, Dingxian Jia
3D iodoargentates [Co(en)3(Ag2I4)]n (1), [Fe(en)3(Ag2I4)]n (2) and [Co(dien)2(Ag2I4)]n·nH2O (3) were prepared by solvothermal methods. Compounds 1–3 were catalytic activity for photodegradation of crystal violet under visible light irradiation.
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Bombay HC restricts Customs Dept. from destroying artworks by famous artists F. N. Souza and Akbar Padamsee

The artworks were seized in 2023 over allegations of obscenity




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Bombay High Court orders Customs Dept. to release artworks of Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee in next two weeks  

The High Court pulled up the Customs Department of Mumbai and said that every nude painting or every painting depicting some sexual intercourse poses cannot be styled as obscene




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NVivo Workshop: Part 2: Further Steps | Nov. 14

Link to Notice




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NVivo Workshop: Part 1: Getting Started | Nov. 14

Link to Notice




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EndNote Parts 1 & 2 (Combined) Workshop Online | Nov. 13

Link to Notice




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Freshworks asks 660 employees to leave as part of ‘global realignment’

The move is expected to result in $11 million to $13 million in charges in the fourth quarter of 2024, consisting primarily of cash expenditure for separation-related payments, employee benefits and related costs




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This is naked greed, nothing less: Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu on Freshworks layoff

‘This is why choose to remain private. We put our customers and employees first. Shareholders should come last,’ Vembu




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Yoke vs. sidestick: Jury still out on what works best for pilots

Why do Airbus commercial aircraft have sidesticks and Boeing have yokes as control units?




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'Fireworks between Sushmita and me'

'People started noticing me again. OTT is a good platform for serious actors. In the olden days, unless you are the heroine, actors would have screen deaths. But now, there are so many good roles for women.'




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HP starts making desktops, workstations at Flex’s unit near Chennai

With the inauguration of this new facility, we aim to strengthen our commitment to India and support the growth of the local manufacturing ecosystem, says Ketan Patel, MD, HP India



  • Computers & Laptops

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The workshop of Thomas Bewick : a pictorial survey / Iain Bain.

[Stocksfield, England] : Thomas Bewick Birthplace Trust, [1989]




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A review on metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and MOF–textile composites for personal protection

Mater. Chem. Front., 2024, 8,3509-3527
DOI: 10.1039/D4QM00358F, Review Article
Junmei Li, Yinan Fan, Ruigan Zhang, Demao Ban, Zhixuan Duan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Lifang Liu
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have become a research hotspot for effective adsorption and degradation of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and toxic industrial chemicals (TICs).
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Tailoring the adsorption properties of imidazole-based halogen bonded organic frameworks for anionic dye removal

Mater. Chem. Front., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4QM00735B, Research Article
Shumeng Wang, Hongqiang Dong, Guanfei Gong, Siyi Lin, Jiahao Zhao, Zhennan Tian, Ya Lu, Xuguan Bai, Meimei Zhang, Lu Wang, Kang-Da Zhang, Shigui Chen
A novel class of [N⋯I⋯N]+ halogen-bonded XOFs were synthesized using imidazole ligands. XOF-TIB showed strong adsorption capacity and selectivity for anionic dyes, with excellent stability and reusability for environmental remediation.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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How Climeworks is Creating Negative Emission Power Plants

In the not-so-distant future, dealing safely with our emissions in a carbon-neutral way will be as natural to us as it is to have our trash picked up by our municipalities, says Jan Wurzbacher, founder of Climeworks. In 2017, Climeworks opened the world’s first negative emissions plant – capturing CO2 at a geothermal plant in Iceland, and turning it into rock. #pollution #geothermal #iceland ABOUT WIRED SMARTER Experts and business leaders from the worlds of Energy, Money and Retail gathered at Kings Place, London, for WIRED Smarter on October 9, 2018. Discover some of the fascinating insights from speakers here: http://wired.uk/V29vMg ABOUT WIRED EVENTS WIRED events shine a spotlight on the innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs who are changing our world for the better. Explore this channel for videos showing on-stage talks, behind-the-scenes action, exclusive interviews and performances from our roster of events. Join us as we uncover the most relevant, up-and-coming trends and meet the people building the future. ABOUT WIRED WIRED brings you the future as it happens - the people, the trends, the big ideas that will change our lives. An award-winning printed monthly and online publication. WIRED is an agenda-setting magazine offering brain food on a wide range of topics, from science, technology and business to pop-culture and politics. CONNECT WITH WIRED Web: http://po.st/WiredVideo Twitter: http://po.st/TwitterWired Facebook: http://po.st/FacebookWired Google+: http://po.st/GoogleWired Instagram: http://po.st/InstagramWired Magazine: http://po.st/MagazineWired Newsletter: http://po.st/NewslettersWired




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Tech Support - Pyrotechnician Answers Fireworks Questions From Twitter

Pyrotechnician Patrick Cyrana joins WIRED to answer your burning questions about fireworks. How are fireworks designed? How do they get their color? What is the most dangerous firework statistically? Who invented fireworks? How do you become a professional pyrotechnician. Patrick answers all of these questions and more—it’s Fireworks Support. Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey Director of Photography: Constantine Economides Editor: Richard Trammell Expert: Patrick Cyrana Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer Camera Operator: Mar Alfonso Sound Mixer: Rebecca ONeil Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen Additional Editor: Jason Malizia; JC Scruggs Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds




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Sweet MOFs: Exploring the Potential and Restraints of Integrating Carbohydrates with Metal-Organic Frameworks for Biomedical Applications

Nanoscale Horiz., 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4NH00525B, Review Article
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Alessio Zuliani, Victor Ramos, Alberto Escudero, Noureddine Khiar
The unique features of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) such as biodegradability, reduced toxicity and high surface area offer the possibility of developing smart nanosystems for biomedical applications through the simultaneous functionalization...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Study shows how human memory works, gets stored




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Enhancing soil geographic recognition through LIBS technology: integrating the joint skewness algorithm with back-propagation neural networks

J. Anal. At. Spectrom., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4JA00251B, Paper
Weinan Zheng, Xun Gao, Kaishan Song, Hailong Yu, Qiuyun Wang, Lianbo Guo, Jingquan Lin
The meticulous task of soil region classification is fundamental to the effective management of soil resources and the development of accurate soil classification systems.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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Social media networks under fire for deflecting responsibility onto regulator

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told Deborah Knight her agency can compel social media companies to remove harmful content which victimises children.

However, we now have more adult cyber abuse reports coming in than we do youth-based cyberbullying reports.

Ms Inman Grant criticised the leadership of social networks for deflecting responsibility onto victims and regulators.




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Facebook Can Not Crush These 3 Resilient Social Networks

Facebook is often considered the 800-pound gorilla of the social networking market. Its family of apps -- which includes its main app, Instagram, and WhatsApp -- grew its monthly active users 14% year over year to 3.21 billion last quarter. Facebook also shares a near-duopoly with Alphabet's Google in the digital ad market.

However, several major social networks are still growing in Facebooks shadow. Lets take a closer look at three of them, how they withstood competition from Facebook, and what that resilience means for Facebooks long-term prospects.

1. Snapchat
2. Pinterest
3. Tiktok




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Unsaturated coordination modulation and enlarged pore size in nanoflower-like metal organic frameworks for enhanced lithium–oxygen battery performance

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2024, 12,30591-30600
DOI: 10.1039/D4TA06346E, Paper
Lingwen Zhao, Juanjuan Feng, Adeel Abbas, Hao Sun, Chunlei Wang, Hongchao Wang
Unsaturated coordination modulation alters the discharge path and increased pore size accelerates ion exchange and oxygen transport, synergistically improving the electrochemical performance of LOBs.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Tailoring biobased polythiourethane crosslinking networks with flame-retardancy and remote ultrafast infrared “welding” performance

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2024, 12,30398-30408
DOI: 10.1039/D4TA05966B, Paper
Ning Ding, Yi Yang, Wei Zhou, Debora Puglia, Pengwu Xu, Deyu Niu, Weijun Yang, Piming Ma
Biobased polythiourethane/MXene nanocomposites with intrinsic flame-retardancy and remote ultrafast infrared “welding” performance.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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One-pot spatial engineering of multi-enzymes in metal–organic frameworks for enhanced cascade activity

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2024, 12,30318-30328
DOI: 10.1039/D4TA06211F, Paper
Wenqing Fan, Kang Liang, Jieying Liang
A one-pot strategy was developed for the first time to achieve the precise spatial arrangement of multiple enzymes in MOFs, improving multi-enzyme cascade efficiency.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Design and construction of porphyrin box-based metal–organic frameworks with hierarchical superstructures for efficient energy transfer and photooxidation

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2024, 12,30685-30691
DOI: 10.1039/D4TA05576D, Paper
Qian Xu, Peng Zhang, Yuanyuan Sun, Jishi Chen, Chuantao Hou, Zonghua Wang
A porphyrin box-based MOF with hierarchical superstructures was synthesized, exhibiting enhanced performance in singlet oxygen-mediated photooxidation.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Improving electromagnetic engineering of thermal conductive composites by establishing continuous thermal conductive networks with gradient impedance

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC03974B, Paper
Dong An, Hongfeng Chen, Huitao Yu, Jiaqi Chen, Junru Yao, Chingping Wong, Wei Feng
Mechanism schematic of the EM wave absorption and thermal conduction of composites.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Silver-incorporated NiCo metal–organic frameworks with controlled morphology for enhanced cycling in flexible supercapacitor applications

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC02970D, Paper
Chu Chu, Wenjing Zhang, Xuehua Yan, Yingnan Yan, Jianmei Pan, Zohreh Shahnavaz, Jamile Mohammadi Moradian
The specific capacitance of NCA15-MOF/NF was 1317 F g−1, which was significantly higher compared to the NCA0-MOF/NF. After 15 000 charge–discharge cycles, the NCA15-MOF/NF retained 89% of its initial specific capacitance.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Application of metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and their derivatives in the cathode materials of aqueous zinc-ion batteries

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC03273J, Review Article
Pingchun Guo, Shisong Ouyang, Hedong Jiang, Jiake Li, Hua Zhu, Yanxiang Wang
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are regarded as potential candidate materials for the cathodes of aqueous zinc-ion batteries. This review presents the applications of MOFs and their derivatives in the cathodes of aqueous zinc-ion batteries.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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Echy lets the sun back into workspaces



  • Solutions & Co

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Medicine wheels of the Plains and Rocky Mountains / an update[d] compendium (Reeves and Kennedy) and edited collection of works by John Brumley, Ted Birmie, Rebecca Kallevig, Barry Dau, Trevor Peck, and Dean Wetzel ; overall editors, Brian O. K. Reeves, M

xxv, 359 pages : illustrations, maps ; 28 cm. + 1 folded map




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How to actually ship software that actually works

Do you think you have what it takes to ship great software? I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not easy and takes a lot of effort—but it’s all skills that you can learn. Here’s my checklist for getting software projects done, in a way that they actually ship and actually work well: Learn […]




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A comprehensive review of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and their derivatives in environmental pollution control

Chem. Soc. Rev., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4CS00521J, Tutorial Review
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Shengbo Ge, Kexin Wei, Wanxi Peng, Runzhou Huang, Esther Akinlabi, Hongyan Xia, Muhammad Wakil Shahzad, Xuehua Zhang, Ben Bin Xu, Jianchun Jiang
Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have gained considerable attention due to their design possibilities as the molecular organic building blocks that can stack in an atomically precise spatial arrangement.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop

Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed. 

Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.

For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position. 

But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.

Designing for personalization makes for strange bedfellows. A savvy art-installation satire on the challenges of humane design in the era of the algorithm. Credit: Signs of the Times, Scott Kelly and Ben Polkinghome.

There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok-aNnc0Dko

We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.

So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.

​From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip moment in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps: 

  1. customer experience optimization (CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation)
  2. always-on automations (whether rules-based or machine-generated)
  3. mature features or standalone product development (such as Spotify’s DJ experience)

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t need these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set your kitchen timer

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can (and often do) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

  1. Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership. .
  2. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
  3. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience.” It explores the personalization possibilities in your organization. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Spark conversation by naming consumer examples and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions (such as onboarding sequences or wizards), notifications, and recommenders. We have a catalog of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature (or something similar). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder (which is why we used the word argument earlier) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Getting intentional about the desired outcomes is an important component to a large-scale personalization program. Credit: Bucket Studio.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? (We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy.) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.

The largest management consultancies have established practice areas in personalization, and they regularly research program risks and challenges. Credit: Boston Consulting Group.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project (as one of our client executives memorably put it). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

Progressive personalization, a framework for designing connected experiences. Credit: Bucket Studio and Colin Eagan.

The ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together over the course of the workshop. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.

In the same way that ingredients form a recipe, you can also create cards to break down a personalized interaction into its constituent parts. Credit: Bucket Studio and Colin Eagan.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure—andyou’ll validate with the right stakeholders present—that you have all the ingredients on hand to cook up your desired interaction (or that you can work out what needs to be added to your pantry). These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together. 

This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team: 

  1. compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette; 
  2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar; 
  3. and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too. 

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Compose your recipe

What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct

  • Who are your key audience segments or groups?
  • What kind of content will you give them, in what design elements, and under what circumstances?
  • And for which business and user benefits?

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below. 

  1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with  a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
  2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
  3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.
A “nurture” automation may trigger a banner or alert box that promotes content that makes it easier for users to complete a common task, based on behavioral profiling of two user types. Credit: Bucket Studio.
A “welcome” automation may be triggered for any user that sends an email to help familiarize them with the breadth of a content library, and this email ideally helps them consider selecting various titles (no matter how much time they devote to reviewing the email’s content itself). Credit: Bucket Studio.
A “winback” automation may be triggered for a specific group, such as users with recently failed credit-card transactions or users at risk of churning out of active usage, that present them with a specific offer to mitigate near-future inactivity. Credit: Bucket Studio.

A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better kitchens require better architecture

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware anyone who says otherwise. With that being said,  “Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes.”

When personalization becomes a laugh line, it’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can definitely stand the heat…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.




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