Introducing Woolean: The app to compare things
Ice cream parlors made me freeze up, as a kid. Not from the freezers, or the brain freeze after wolfing down a scoop. Indecision, instead, left me holding up the line.
I’d step up to the counter, puzzle over the dozens of choices at the local ice cream parlor (the—sadly—long-defunct Kay’s of Knoxville), and settle for something reliable and familiar in the face of so many options. Over time, I settled on a rubric: I choose limited edition flavors or whatever I’ve never tried before, favoring novelty over familiarity.
Making choices between a wide range of equally appealing options can bring the best minds to a halt. You know, deep down, that you’re leaning in one direction. Yet what about this? What about that? You’re afraid of making the wrong choice, scared the right choice is not the absolute best. So you halter, waver, go back and change your mind, frozen by analysis paralysis.
Yet there’s a simple trick to overcome it: Reduce the options.
It’s hard to choose between 31 flavors. Far easier to choose between chocolate, vanilla, and salted caramel. That applies when you’re choosing items alone, or in a group; it’s almost possible to get a group of friends to decide between 10 restaurant options, but if you remove every option that anyone dislikes and have 3 non-objectionable top choices, it’s both easier to pick one option and safer since anything that gets chosen is unlike to be anyone’s least-favorite restaurant.
It’s not like you want no choices. It’d be a boring ice cream parlor that served only vanilla, and when a friend suggests a new restaurant, there’s always the chance you’ll discover a new favorite. You want just enough choices, not so many as to be overwhelming, but at least enough to require your input.
And so we built an app: Woolean. It’s the app to help you decide things.
The idea, for my co-founder Ryan, started with choosing lunch options. For me, the idea solidified with design and wording choices. For years, I’ve shipped articles to editors with multiple title and subtitle options (along, sometimes, with multiple header image options as well). I’d write my three favorites, they’d then comment on a favorite one or two, and we’d go from there. It’s like A/B testing ad copy, led by the content team’s personal preferences.
Then the same thing came up, when I worked with a design firm on Reproof’s branding. Our designers sent us three color palettes and four logo options—each were great, but we needed to choose the best. And so we’d remove our least favorite options, one at a time, until we settled on something we loved.
Again and again, I’ve found making choices to be easier when I can first winnow the options down, then choose from two of the best things. It goes for font choices, for photos, for vacation hotel choices, even for flights where you’re trading off getting to the airport at an ungodly hour for a direct flight.
Woolean is built for that and more. You can add a list of anything: Plain text items, dates, colors in hex value (including entire color palettes), links (complete with a preview), images, and audio. You can type out the list, or upload it as a spreadsheet. You can add a title if you’d like (to ask people to choose their favorite logo style without worrying about the colors, yet, perhaps).
Woolean will split any list up into one-on-one, pairwise comparisons of two options. Do you like the item on the left or right better? Click to vote—or use your right and left arrow keys to fly through comparisons. This versus that, over and over, until you work your way through the list.
As you’re voting, you’ll start to see your personal preferences taking shape. You might choose vanilla over strawberry, but would choose chocolate over vanilla, and salted caramel over chocolate and strawberry and oh turns out salted caramel is my favorite.
Share the link, and you’ll see the same realization unfold from your friends and colleagues’ choices. You might not find a unanimous favorite food for your next outing, but you’ll definitely find out that one thing that no one chose and can ensure you don’t pick everyone’s least favorite food.
Woolean is just for fun—and we’d love to hear how you use it. We’ve used it to make all types of decisions over the past few months, from Woolean’s name to its logo and core features.
Give it a try at woolean.com, list some things you want to compare, and let us know what you think. It’s 100% free—and while we might add some additional paid features in the future (and you can vote on those features now, in Woolean)
Go compare some things!
Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.