Breaking free from the shackles of choice

How feed-free design, paired with social solves choice overload

Whether it’s travel, food, films, games, music, we all have our favourites even though there are many options. This is where humans fall prey to the exploration-exploitation trade off, and we repeatedly choose the same things over and over again. Let’s explore this with music. We try to immaculately collect and sort our most heard tracks in playlists according to genre, activity and feelings. But.. that list is finite and we find ourselves feeling bound by the same selection of music and get sick of this repetition. But we choose to consume the same content because it was convenient; picking something new wasn’t easy. It’s the same when we spend ages on an app but end up ordering the same ol’ Subway order or binge-watching the same ol’ sitcom. We feel like we want more: more discovery, more novelty and only then, we’d come back to our comfortable space — playlists with our favourites.

The solution to this “more” is in the feeds. We are given discovery options using a feed. There’s a feed waiting for us with a bunch of albums, mixes, playlists and recents to choose from. We don’t know what to pick nor do we know how to go about choosing. This abundance of options to choose from leaves us feeling extremely overwhelmed, in different aspects of our lives (food, travel, channel to study from) and it feels like we’re in this loop of fretting, choosing, repeat.

These options are scary especially when we aren’t sure what we want to listen to. Don’t have a genre or track to begin with in mind, and you find yourself in a spiral of scouring through these all-equally-amazing options endlessly. Even though you’re someone who prides yourself in discovery, you find yourself going to the same old playlists over and over.

You vacillate between wanting to try something new, and just quickly settling for something. In an extreme case of choice overload, especially when there’s a ticking clock, you end up crumbling under intensifying pressure, and end up choosing.. nothing.

We are indeed still headed deep into information and choice overload as we continue consuming content the way we do. We’re constantly thinking about what we are missing out on, worried about the time we’re throwing away — could I have picked a better video to watch or could I have done something more productive while I was on Instagram? Instead of feeling satisfied and enjoying the content that has come up, we’re headed in a spiral that leads to us being less and less mindful with every passing day.

At Lishash, we believe that we need to build a platform where there are no feeds of static content that is dished out solely by algorithms. The following is the framework that we’ve used to build a feed — free platform that’s not AI dependent.

An algorithm knows best — but why? And is that always true? We assume that a machine will know us best, every single time but that is often ignoring an important facet of humans: the desire to be connected to other humans. This is why review systems on any platforms are never going away; we trust the experiences of fellow people. I’m likelier to visit a restaurant that a friend raved about than one that shows up on my Zomato feed because I don’t know what I don’t know about how algorithms rate.

It’s the same when it comes to music: humans seem to be the best places for discovery. If a fellow progressive rock lover were to send me song recommendations, I’d much prefer that than having an algorithm guess what I enjoy. This is why the algorithm on Lishash adds a social layer over what plays by playing songs shared with you by people first. So, say you’ve placed filters on the genre metal, and on the speechiness: instrumental but blocking Dream Theatre, it’ll play songs shared by your friends that match these filters first. Another way to listen to music, with humans, is that you can just hop into a session where they’re already listening to music. A group of humans curate music together for everyone’s listening experience.

YouTube throws up varied content across genres and topics, leaving us more confused with what to pick, and more dissonant after picking. Currently, algorithms give you a wide array of choices to pick from and don’t always help us narrow scopes down, when that is what we need. The need of the hour is to replace infinite choices with infinite control. This means giving the users the reigns of what they want to consume.

What works really well for Lishash in the case of music are advanced filters. Instead of bombarding users with options of playlists, mixes, albums, we give them control to a large degree over what plays. Users can filter any combination of genres, languages, artists, emotions, loudness, speechiness, and almost all important music traits.

On the other side of having so much control is the side where you surrender control, and say — I don’t want to choose, I just want an easy way to start the music quick. This is something that Apple Music and Netflix tried out in beta versions, with their infinity buttons, where music or a TV show/movie would just start playing. It didn’t take off because it was at direct war with the other way to start — feeds. However, this means of not having to choose at all becomes an imperative solution to choice overload.

Lishash provides two solutions to “let all go” on the app:

All of this automatically allows us to create a platform whose primary interface is not a list of static content.

Currently, lists (in our context, playlists) is what people are used to, attached to even. Choice overload is a latent problem, something that isn’t obviously felt because it’s almost never discussed. Designing an interface that makes the realization of a need explicit, along with making a shift easy is the biggest challenge we face. For instance, to be feed free, we’d have to ensure that there aren’t too many sessions on the home page. This comes at the cost of “engagement” and time spent on the app. To further improve recommendations, several hardware advancements need to be made to get higher bandwidth information about user preferences in real-time.

Real fulfilment stems out of satisfaction, not options. With this feed free design, we can rid ourselves of the feeling that technology has got a grip on us, like we’re puppets and tech the string master. We’d feel like we’re the ones in control, not an algorithm. It would actually give us control, and allow us to be in the moment — whatever we may be doing.

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