An evaluation of tailored web materials for public administration

Abstract

Public Administration organizations generally write their citizen-focused, informational materials for generic audiences because they don't have the resources to produce personalized materials for everyone. The goal of this project is to replace these generic materials, which must include careful discussions of the conditions distinguishing the various constituencies within the generic audience, with tailored materials, which can be automatically personalized to focus on the information relevant to an individual reader. Two key questions must be addressed. First, are the automatically produced, tailored forms more effective than the generic forms they replace, and second, is the time the reader spends specifying the demographic information on which the tailoring is based too costly to be worth the effort. This paper describes an adaptive hypermedia application that produces tailored materials for students exploring government educational entitlement programs, and focuses in particular on the effectiveness of the generated tailored material.