Writing · Product design · · 5 min read
Two buttons that should have been one
What working on Sociora taught me about cutting steps, cutting themes, and telling people the truth when a post fails.
Sociora is a social media tool for small businesses. You make a post once and it goes out to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads and YouTube, each in a shape that platform actually likes. I’m one of the co-founders, and a lot of my time goes into the parts of the product people touch every day.
Most of what I’m proud of there is stuff I took away.
Publish now, or later?
For a while, posting had two paths. One drawer for publishing right away, another for scheduling. They looked alike, asked for almost the same things, and lived in different places. People had to decide which door to walk through before they had even finished the post.
The thing is, nobody thinks of these as two jobs. You finish a post and then you decide when it goes out. So I redesigned the drawer first, then merged the two into one flow. You get to the end, and the last choice is simply now or later.
It sounds small. It removed a whole question from the start of the journey and moved it to the moment people are actually ready to answer it.
One step instead of three
Creating a post from scratch used to be a little wizard. Pick this, then that, then continue. Every step felt reasonable on its own, but together they slowed down the most common thing anyone does in the app.
I collapsed it into a single step. Same choices, one screen. On the template side we went the other way and made browsing richer, with a proper gallery and a preview of each format, because that part is about exploring, not getting through it.
We deleted the dark theme
This one was hard to say out loud. We had a dark theme, and every new screen needed two versions of itself. That is a lot of work for a choice most of our users never made.
So we removed it entirely and rebuilt the app and the landing page on one light design system. Fewer colours to maintain, no bugs that only appear in one mode, and more time for the screens that matter.
Tell people when it breaks
Posting to many platforms means things fail. A token expires, an image is the wrong size, a platform has a bad day. The easy option is to show a happy calendar and hope.
I went the other way. The content calendar now shows failed publications right where you planned them, and the post detail page shows the delivery status for every platform separately, with the actual error. Empty and error states say what happened and what to do next.
A tool you rely on to talk to your customers has to be honest with you first.
What I keep coming back to
Every one of these changes made the product smaller, and every one made it better. That’s the pattern I trust most now. When something feels heavy, the answer is rarely another feature. It’s usually a step, a screen or a whole mode that shouldn’t be there.