Designing with choice
Building a smarter product with fewer options
Today you will make more than 200 decisions about food. A child makes as many as 3,000 choices each day. An adult? 35,000. The stats on how much information we digest and make decisions about are staggering. With the increasing number of screens, notifications and wearables, we now encounter 5 times the daily amount of information as a person in 1986. We are suffering from decision fatigue and our interfaces aren’t helping.
Advanced platforms are overloaded with features, crammed with every idea a developer thought to include. But as the wise Dr. Ian Malcolm once warned,
“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could do it, you didn’t stop to ask if you should.”
The truth is less choice is the future of designing interfaces. Artificial Intelligence will play a role in this, anticipating your needs before they arise, but so do product designers by creating options only when they’re actually necessary.
At Yieldmo, our design team spent time with clients asking about the kinds of choices they have to make to set up something as simple as a single mobile ad. The effort is herculean. Salespeople, art directors, developers, strategists, and designers are involved in generating series of mock ads before a final design goes live. Design and development talent are expensive for organizations and there is a high opportunity cost to using their skill set on every mock. Once made, the mock-ups spend dizzying rounds in emails and phone conferences having to repeat the design/dev bottleneck a dozen times or more before getting approval and launching.
There are platforms out there trying to fix that. Our clients told us that one tool they use, Celtra, boasts new features every month and hosts massive web conferences training legions of users on how to make new things with the platform. Interfaces like these are fine for advanced users (like a designer using Photoshop), but it also means only a few people in the office ever truly learn how to use such a complicated product.
High-capability approaches to tools mean well, but in their quest to be useful for every situation, they relegate themselves away from the everyman and toward the specialized few. The process bottlenecks again.
When I set out to design the way Yieldmo would approach the mobile ad-building problem, I crafted three design principles that would make sure our impact was different:
Accessibility
Before platforms, workflows choked up in queues of requests for designers’ time. After platforms, the queues simply shifted to the poor sucker who attended all those training courses on how to use the latest tool. Yieldmo’s first goal from the start was designing something simple enough that anyone in the office, regardless of technical inclination and familiarity with our services, could create a mobile ad in seconds. We measured this approachability against everyday tasks to ensure accessibility was achieved. We think mock-ups should be as simple and commonplace as brewing a pot of coffee.
Easier collaboration
Emails, texts, and terminology become stumbling blocks in the chaotic ad world. We sought to simplify this by hosting the mock-ups ourselves and providing users with a short URL that would be easy to pass back and forth. When the ad is ready, its already in our network and ready to run. This cuts back on versions and email mix-ups.
Faster designing
“Speedstorming” your ad ideas enables quicker iteration and faster evolution. Our clients often face short turnaround times and need a faster way to visually articulate ideas and move a conversation forward. This means a step-by-step guided flow works better than an open-ended one.
Designing with fewer choices is like a highway versus a multi-lane intersection. You wouldn’t use slow back roads to cross town. There’d be too many choices and intersections that could slow you down. Instead, you’d use a highway. There are fewer options for turning there, but you’d get where you’re going more efficiently.
