The question
How does relevance decay, renew or change as a person's context moves?
Relevance is often treated as a property of the message, recommendation or offer. But relevance also belongs to a moment. Circumstances change. Intent moves. The reason someone was interested may no longer exist by the time the experience responds.
What we want to understand
- How quickly different needs lose relevance.
- Whether recent behaviour should always outweigh longer-term patterns.
- How timing, frequency and relationship history affect perceived usefulness.
- When a delayed response becomes intrusive, absurd or simply invisible.
- How an experience can detect that a once-valid assumption has expired.
A working example
A customer searches for travel insurance during a short planning window. Two weeks later, the trip is cancelled. The system continues to serve increasingly confident recommendations based on a need that no longer exists.
The personalisation improves. The relevance disappears.