How we designed recommendations to simplify decision-making
We are constantly making decisions throughout our daily lives; it is essential to our living. As choices & options increase, making decisions becomes more and more difficult rather complex.
Our digital lives are no different. Many successful businesses run a strong recommendation engine and make everyday choices like — what to have for dinner, which movie to watch, simpler for the user.
Apart from digital businesses, recommendation systems are also present in the real world — Here’s a real life example
Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
But, will the recommender system help our users?
Just to give you a short brief, OneAssist is an Indian insure-tech that helps to protect your gadgets, home appliances, and wallets against all types of misfortunes.
- Smartphone owners understand that it is expensive to replace or repair smartphones; screen repair alone can cost somewhere between 25% to 30% of the phone cost. While many people realise they need it, they don’t purchase insurance. As per Redseer’s 2020 report ,70% of smartphone owners realise the need of having a Smartphone Insurance and 50% are willing to pay for it.
- This laid the ground-work for other products as well. An average home has 2–3 appliances and the need for repair, periodic servicing is constant and expensive.
This helped us identify the points we can use to persuade users. So we built the recommendations around pointers like how an insurance plan could help save money on repairs, highlighted benefits, showed user stories, added social proofing and more.
Design Strategy
While the business objective was clearly to engage, retain and sell, the design team worked on 3 aspects: Collect information, reduce cognitive load and improve decision making
Collect explicit and implicit data
With all stakeholders locked in a meeting room for hours, we went through the various ideas of asking users for information without making the interface seem lethargic while also keeping locus of control with the user — we provided an option to skip and guided the user on home screen to share this information.
Reduce cognitive load
We followed the 3 C’s for the copy — Clear, concise, consistent. This involved making sure that the headline text on the screen was a continuation of the copy used in push notification and also minimal use of microcopy. Apart from this, we focused only on the aspects which is important for a user — The golden circle: Why, How and What? To make insurance simpler for everyone by offering the right recommendations along with strong headlines and microcopy.
We also made sure to remove redundant information and only show our unique selling points.
Positive scenario: User showed interest and did some action like scroll, time spent, clicks …,etc.
Negative scenario: User showed low interest like time spent was very less, no actions performed.
Basis the level of interest user has shown, system would send the next recommendation and so on.
Help in decision making
We wanted users to perceive that they achieve the best possible outcome with the least amount of effort. In our case, it’s as easy as clicking on a push notification and landing on the desired screen.
If you look at the notification on the left, we talked about how mobile repairs can be expensive. And on the respective landing page we’re telling the user how we can help with this particular problem.
As designers, we can direct a users focus on a specific risk area by emphasising on that aspect (Ex; we focused on monetary risk). Similarly, we thought of more such aspects we can focus on.
