Too Many Choices
Simplifying the kiosk flow
"The current kiosk home screen has twelve buttons. I want us to explore what happens when we reduce that to four. Same functionality — fewer visible choices."
"But if we hide eight options, won't riders miss them? What about the people who need monthly passes or accessibility settings — if those aren't visible on the first screen, how would they even know they exist?"
She'd read about cognitive load in the rider transcripts — how twelve options overwhelmed people. But removing options felt wrong too. It felt like hiding the emergency exits in a building and hoping no one ever needed them.
"I pulled the usage data from Priya's kiosk logs. Three findings: 1) single ticket accounts for 41% of all taps, 2) day pass is 28%, 3) top-up is 19%. Everything else combined — monthly passes, zone changes, accessibility, account settings — totals 12%."
"So the four most-used options cover 88% of riders? But that last 12% — some of those are the riders who need the system most."
"If a building has a grand entrance and a side corridor, does the corridor disappear simply because most people use the front door?"
She turned the analogy over. The corridor didn't disappear — it was reached from a different point. Maybe the other eight options could still exist, just not all competing for attention on the same screen.
"What if the first screen shows only the four most common tasks, and the rest are one tap deeper? The options don't disappear — they just move behind a door that most riders won't need to open?"
"That's the trade-off. You reduce cognitive load on the first screen for 88% of riders in exchange for one extra tap for the remaining 12%. The math works — but only if the path to those secondary options is clear and labeled."
The approach Sable and Tomoko are describing — showing only the most relevant options first and revealing the rest on demand — is called progressive disclosure (a design pattern that sequences information across steps, showing only what's needed at each point). It reduces cognitive load without removing functionality.
"I could sketch a few versions — maybe the four primary buttons are large, and a smaller 'More options' link sits below them? That way nothing is hidden, it's just... quieter."
Sable flipped her notebook open and drew two quick rectangles — one crammed with twelve small squares, the other with four generous tiles and a thin line beneath. The second one felt calmer. She could almost breathe looking at it.
1. When Rafa challenged the team to cut from twelve buttons to four, he forced them to confront cognitive load as a design problem. Twelve equally-weighted options demand that riders evaluate each one before deciding — the effort of that evaluation is often enough to cause hesitation, errors, or abandonment, as the rider transcripts showed.
2. Sable's "door" insight — moving less-used options one step deeper rather than removing them — reveals the core of designing for simplicity. Simplicity isn't about stripping functionality away; it's about organizing what's visible so the most common paths are immediately clear while others remain reachable. When Sable sketched the two screens, the calmer one wasn't emptier — it was better organized.
12 equal buttons → 4 primary tiles + "More options" = reduced load for 88% of ridersThe tension between showing everything and showing just enough has shaped interface thinking for decades — the insight that people perform better with fewer visible choices, as long as they trust the rest are still reachable, is central to managing complexity in design.