Improving User Experience with Guided Mental Simulation: Why Swiggy POP is doubly amazing!
Making choices is hard. And it doesn’t matter if it is a crucial decision trivial one that has no long-term impact. We are wired to optimize for every decision that is presented to us, some more so than others. Take watching a movie for example. Picking a new movie to watch, sometimes becomes a mentally exhausting task even if you don’t really care. You don’t really know what to watch and there are literally thousands of options out there.
Decision making is especially difficult if there is no objective good choice and the success of the decision is purely based on one’s feeling. You might regret picking up an Oscar-winning suspense movie just because you weren’t in the mood for it. And when you ask yourself what you really wanted to watch, you still won’t be sure. So what is happening here?
There are two phenomenons at play here:
Paradox of Choice
This is something we are familiar with and see almost every day. Availability of too many choices increase anxiety because of the increased burden of evaluating all options and you’ll always miss out on the benefits of the options you reject. [Example of Paradox of Choice.]
Constructive Decision Theory
This is a lesser-known concept. It goes something like this “individuals often lack the requisite cognitive resources to form well-defined preferences that are invariant to the context in which decisions are made. Instead, they often construct preferences on the spot when prompted to make decisions”
In simple words, we don’t really understand our preferences when making a decision, we build our preferences while making the decision. And the process with which we choose actually affects our preferences.
Going back to our movie example, we just know that we want to watch a movie but we do not know to maximize which criteria will give us most delight. When start browsing on Netflix, we slowly build more refined preferences like — “something that has Jim Carrey would be nice”, “nothing too long”. These preferences are created when browsing on Netflix, and may have changed had we started browsing on IMDB.
The curious case of Swiggy Pop
Swiggy or any food delivery app is amazing. It is a magic box in your phone that gets super tasty, yet cheap, food of your choice delivered to your door so fast! But with so many options, we now have a new problem.
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
Me: You wanna order some food?
Roommate: Yeah m starving.
Me: What do you want?
Roommate: Whatever you choose is fine
Me: Still…
Roommate: I dunno, you choose
Me: How about chinese?
Roomate: Any thing else is fine
Me: I’m getting a pizza
Roomate: okay
Me: Actually, I don’t want pizza
Roommate: C’mon man!
And it goes on….
Feeling / Problem
- The user does not know what they want to eat, or what they prefer
- There are too many choices available
Action the user takes
- Intimidated by the options, they either do not open the app or open it just to close it again
- They take a long time deciding what to order while building internal frustration
- Deferred to being loyal to limited options like Freshmenu or Subway just to avoid this dilemma
Solution
This is where Swiggy POP comes in. It provides single-serve meals in a specified price range from 20–30 restaurants with wide variation in food groups.
Intended Results achieved
- Removing paradox of choice by providing limited options
- Reducing effort in ordering with a simpler flow with no discounts, no delivery charge, no customizations.
Unintended Results, where things get interesting
POP not only solves the problem for single-serve users but it actually solves the big recommendation problem even for groups.
Going a little deeper in the Constructive Decision Theory we discussed earlier. Most of the Online Shopping sites also face this problem. They also face users abandoning their search because
- Too many choices
- User does not know what they actually want
E-Commerce websites are solving this problem with the help of recommendation agents(RA). RAs break down the user experience in two stages:
- Stage 1: User goes through a list of curated recommendations instead of a large set of products which helps the user identify their preferences
- Stage 2: User applies the upgraded knowledge of their needs to zero-in on 3–4 alternatives for detailed comparison.
In Online Shopping, there are still some objective criteria one has to reduce their options. With food, everything is open-ended, which is why this process for swiggy has an edge over all other solutions
Stage 1: Guided Mental Simulation with Swiggy POP
Swiggy pop with its limited number of options, still wide in variety, allows the user to simulate between a lot of categories faster and much easier. This Mental Simulation is essential because this is the place where the user frames their preferences by means of Imagining what will delight them most —
- Sabzi Poori — Nah
- Biryani —Maybe
- Thali — Nah
- Pizza— Nah
- Waffles — YUM!
Now just because the user say saw Banana Caramel Oreo Waffle with Ice Cream at The Waffles Hut doesn’t mean they are going to order it. But now they know that they prefer waffle and will be much more confident in their search.
Stage 2: Search
This is where swiggy is a rockstar because it has a really good search experience, providing the user all the relevant information while searching
Adding a little more specificity to the search.
And done. From not knowing what to eat to ordering food that has the highest likelihood for delight achieved with minimum cognitive effort.
And it can be checked if this behavior had a positive impact on the user experience:
Why is it better?
It might not seem easy, so let us evaluate how this stands against alternatives. Ignoring money, there are two key factors affecting a users purchase decision:
- Perceived Delight of the choice
- Cognitive Ease in making the choice
Let’s map it out.
Here you’d see Subway is the easiest but the most boring one. Freshmenu is slightly easier than POP because the user knows what to expect here. And there is slightly more effort from moving to Searching on Swiggy from POP but now it is so worth it!
Conclusion:
Marketplaces which are not merely painkillers but are in the business of selling delight don’t just have to need to make all options accessible to the user. They also must do a good job at helping the user discover the experience which will provide THEM the most delight.
Notes:
