The illusion of personalization
Why the best products make decisions for you
Many products give us the feeling of choice without giving us full control.
We pick preferences during onboarding. We customize settings. We choose goals, interests, themes. Then we see an animation saying, “We’re optimizing your experience.” It feels personal. If you’ve ever used education, fitness, or calorie tracking apps, you know what this is about.
“Choose your goal.”
“Let us assess your level.”
“Tell us what you care about.”
In reality, most of these choices map us into a small number of predefined paths. The core experience barely changes. Customization? Mostly around the edges.
The product learns more from your behavior in the next 10 minutes than from these onboarding answers, but these prompts reduce cold-start anxiety.
But why do they still do it?
To create a sense of involvement and commitment before the experience even begins.
Real customization is expensive. It fragments behavior, ruins comparability, and increases long term complexity. Products need predictability to measure, iterate, and scale. So instead of adapting to each user, they offer something safer:
The perception of control.
But users… they actually like this.
Because full control is a burden. It requires understanding tradeoffs, revisiting decisions, and taking responsibility when things don’t work out. Most people don’t want that. They will say they want it, but they don’t.
What looks like “fake”, or partial customization offers exactly what users need: action without cognitive cost.
You can see this more clearly if you imagine the opposite.
What if Netflix didn’t suggest anything? No ranked rows, no autoplay, no “Top Picks”. Just a giant catalog. It looks like more freedom, but it’s also much more trouble. Most users would scroll, hesitate, and leave.
What if Spotify stopped deciding what plays next, and you had to manually choose every song? What if you had to decide what to learn next in Duolingo?
In all these cases, removing guidance would increase the number of options. But also anxiety, effort, and churn.
If you’re old enough, you probably remember how people used to get hooked on TV channels or radio. You didn’t know what was coming next, you didn’t have much control, and that uncertainty was part of the appeal.
As content moved from broadcast schedules to on-demand formats, first with physical media, and later with streaming, that feeling gradually disappeared.
So instead of removing choice, products started shaping it for you.
People don’t want to design their own experience, even if they claim the opposite. The goal shouldn’t be adapting to every user.
Users want someone to quietly tell them what they need, what they want, and what to do next. So the goal should be to reduce complexity for them.
Give users room to engage, while deciding just enough for them.