The implications of showing the same content to different types of users but still making them believe it is specific to their needs?

Question

Let me try to elaborate a bit more about my question:

Some websites, like financial institutions, target a large audience. They divide their business users into multiple segments(e.g.: corporations, medium large companies, self-employed etc...)

Allowing them to push different products and relevant information specific to the needs of that segment.

I have come across a couple of examples which apply a slightly different approach. They provide the user with a choice. An intermediate page shows all segments where the user can choose the one which applies to him/her.

If you take a closer look, you see the information presented is the same for each segment.

This is most likely done to reduce development & maintenance costs.

My question is:

In what way does this affect the UX? Can users be fooled like this?

Other examples like this are very welcome...

I have read an article in the past addressing this practice, any tips about the article would be awesome as well.

Thanks!

Answer 1

To my mind, if there actually is no difference in the service for the particular customer types, it would even be confusing trying to make it look as if there were differences. If the website owners formulate their services differently, users will have problems to figure out, which type of customer they belong to or which services are useful for them. Customers usually compare the services for different customer types and then decide, which ,,level'' they want to use.

So, in order to make different customer types feel addressed while lacking major differences, you should rather adapt the "Home" or "Welcome"-Page such that it clearly lists the customer types the organisation targets.

For the site you have shown the segmentation of the menu seems to be insuitable, as it is quite confusing to click at the different customer types and not seeing a major difference. It would be better to do without a segmentation, that actually is not one. Instead, they should place a section "target group" at a striking place and describe the benefits for different companies there.