Platforms like Netflix and Youtube have done a lot to showcase the agonizing luxury of choice. When there are no bounds limiting the options people have when making a selection, the ability to be confident in the choices made is inversely proportional to the number of choices presented. There needs to be some level of variety, however at a certain point, an increase in variety negatively impacts satisfaction and erodes one's confidence even after a selection has been made. Pickplace is an exercise in addressing the Paradox of Choice as it relates to deciding where to get food and drinks in a specific city.
Similar to the vast optionality users get when using streaming services, so too is there an abundance of choice when it concerns browsing places to dine and drink (more true for medium to large cities).
The solution to this problem is simple, reduce a user's number of options. Building off the previously stated, one could assume that as the number of options reduces, the ease at which someone makes - and is confident in - a decision should increase. This quickly becomes an exercise in simplification. The same way YouTube has a sophisticated recommendation engine to feed users videos they have a high probability of engaging with, Pickplace looks to address the Paradox of Choice by feeding its users with personalized recommendations served by reimagining the way people search.
Today, text and speech-to-text are the two primary ways users execute search. This makes sense when considering search engines need to accommodate results across the entirety of the web, however, when the context is already specified (let’s say.. dining and drinking in your city for example), this expands the possibilities of what's reasonable for search in terms of interaction design.
How do you find an interaction that requires the least effort from users while providing the highest value to them?
Keep it simple.
The solution to this problem became an exercise in minimization. The number of screens needed to be minimized (one), the actions needed to be minimized (one), the cognitive overhead required needed to be minimized (reduce thought), and, if possible, make the experience enjoyable. The product of this exercise was a tag-based search approach.
It works like this:
1. User launches application
2. Arrives at the empty state of the results page
3. User taps on a provided list of attributes that are associated with destinations in their city
4. Results are served to users
The power of this interaction is the user's ability to manipulate the results with the tap of a tag. As many or as few tags can be selected and results are immediately updated to accommodate the change in tag selection. This reduces the cognitive load immensely where search is primarily a user responding to system prompts instead of coming up with their own queries. With the feedback loop being near-instant, it also makes for a more game-like experience for users to select and de-select tags based upon the changing results that are served to them.
