User Experience Best Practices: How To Balance Rigidity and Optionality in Product Design
Behind the feature written by: Noah Neustadt (Lead Product Designer @ Wethos)
When it comes to complex software, nailing the user experience can make or break the product. One fundamental challenge is finding the right balance between rigidity and optionality within the tool - and this can (should!) vary quite a bit from one section of the platform to the next.
Rigidity is a double-edged blade - it has the benefit of keeping things consistent and familiar, but it also limits the number of use cases the experience can facilitate.
Optionality, being the flip side of that coin, adds customizability and control - but can steepen the learning curve and negatively impact adoption.
Finding the right middle ground can be difficult, and depends on the specific experience you're designing, as well as the goals of your users. When we redesigned our proposal builder this was one of the first hurdles we had to overcome.
How to leverage user research to make better decisions on rigidity vs optionality
One of the learnings we uncovered early on (which I found surprising) was that our users weren't particularly interested in extra bells and whistles - things like hero images and embellishments, which they deemed to be superfluous. Instead, what we heard consistently was a need for more automation, both within the process of creating the proposal, and in the workflows following its acceptance (things like deposits, automatic invoices, and payment schedules).
Our research led us to develop new patterns within our software to create a more modular proposal-building experience, leveraging progressive disclosure to add optionality with minimal additional cognitive load. With this, users gained the ability to toggle on new sections or keep them hidden if they weren’t needed.
For example, we added 'Deposits' which, when toggled on, allows the user to set a dollar or percentage amount, and generate an automatic invoice upon client signature.
Additionally, we revamped the users' personal template library. Creating more optionality within this auxiliary experience to allow users to optimize their own proposal creation process without convoluting the proposal builder itself.
The Results: Measureably improved delight of the platform.
Immediately following these changes we observed a significant increase in user activation and adoption, and began receiving positive qualitative feedback. As I mentioned, rigidity and optionality can be a tough balance - but it's critical for a successful tool. Designers should embrace contextual flexibility, utilize progressive disclosure, and think about how other pieces of their platform can impact the experience they are working on.
And as always, just keep checking the data and chatting with users.
Learn more about the design influences behind Wethos product strategy.
✨ AI-Generated Proposals, The Future of Proposal Creation from Anay Gupta (Software Engineer) and Claire Humphreys (CPO)
🛒 Why Our Proposal Builder is Built like an E-Comm Experience from Kristin Hodgkinson (Lead Product Manager)
🪢 Streamlining Operations with Embedded Proposals in Invoices from Gemma Horn (Director of Product Operations)
