Background

I recently started working on a project that primarily delivers content to end-users via a native mobile app. One of the key requirements I am working on is to deliver personalized content to end users of this mobile app.

This is my first opportunity to work with Sitecore Personalize in depth.

Wearing my architectural hat, and without re-inventing the wheel, I sought to look out for some reference architecture that I could build on.

There seems to be a lot of existing official Sitecore docs on Sitecore Personalize for both business users and developers. I will advise you will need some patience and time to go through the docs which have quite a lot of content.

If you prefer watching videos instead, the Sitecore Discover channel has done some justice to this topic too, especially the content from Dylan Young.

As much as the docs are very well written and the content is quite useful, I found myself jumping a bit to piece together my solution. This can be frustrating especially when Personalizing a Mobile App should be a common use-case you could imagine.

I have decided to document my journey on this project, so that I can share with you any learnings, tips, and tricks for Personalizing Native Mobile apps.

Mobile App Personalization reference architecture

Above is a reference architecture I have come up with for my solution.

At a very high level, my mobile app will consume content that is delivered on the Sitecore Experience edge. Sitecore Experience Edge is a set of services based on the Content as a Service (CaaS) model. It enables you to seamlessly deliver structured content across any channel that other applications and properties can easily consume.

The origin of this content published on the Sitecore Experience Edge could be either Sitecore Content Hub or Sitecore XM cloud. Sitecore Content Hub is a strategic enterprise solution that provides you with a variety of features centered around digital assets and marketing content.

Sitecore Personalize will leverage the Decisioning model, Omni-channel Experiences and Experimentation capabilities to provide all the required personalized content in the mobile app. This includes copy content, imagery and other media. I will be sharing step by step details on how to achieve this.

Sitecore Personalize can integrate with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) of choice, which I have left open for now. Please note I could decide to go with Sitecore CDP solution here too. The key feature here is to ingest customer profile data, to input into our Personalization decisioning engine.

I have introduced an Orchestration layer between my mobile app and the Sitecore Personalize, mainly for some security considerations that I will cover in detail a bit later in this blog series.

I will let you review and digest this high solution level architecture. Please leave me your initial thoughts and comments.

Next steps

In my next blog, I will deep dive into the two blocks from bottom of my reference architecture.