Comparative Analysis: Decision-Making

Team 3: Alahji Barry, Elyse Cornwall, Kaitlin Peng, Anooshree Sengupta, Cecilia Wu

Introduction

Our team is interested in encouraging people to make faster decisions and with more confidence. We reviewed 10 apps that relate to decision-making in order to understand what current solutions exist on the market. The target audience for all of these apps is people who are indecisive and/or have trouble feeling confident about their decisions.

Deep Dives into Comparators

FYI Decision, app

By Elyse

FYI Decisions lets users list the criteria and options for a decision, choose how important each criterion is, and then rank how each option scores for each criterion. It generates a bar graph showing how your options stack up relative to one another, which the user can interpret in order to make their final decision. Here’s a sequence in which I decide where to eat based on price, vegetarian options, and distance:

This app allows users to lay out all of the factors in their decision-making process in an intuitive and detailed way. While the interface was tricky to navigate (I had to return to the first screen several times to navigate to the next step), the options available to me in terms of labeling, ranking, and visualizing the decision were easy to understand. The final screen, which displays the overall decision as a bar chart, is useful because it does give a definitive answer of what choice is best based on your inputs. However, I’d imagine that indecisive people still might want to go back and add more criteria, or adjust some of the factors, even after seeing this result. Further, it does take a few minutes to add in all of the relevant information for a decision, so this app is not meant to generate fast decisions.

I’d say that this app is for people who want to make thoughtful, informed decisions and aren’t in a big hurry. Our solution could improve upon this app by making the task flow clearer; what’s the order in which users need to enter information to see their final answer?

Unique value proposition: a methodical approach to decision making that helps users rank and visualize all of the factors contributing to their decision.

 

Tiny Decisions, app

By Elyse

Tiny Decisions is all about using randomization to help users make decisions. It offers 4 different random choice tools: a spinning wheel, a finger selector, a random number generator, and a coin flip (shown from left to right below).

  

These are basically different views of the same random output, but they do add some excitement to everyday decisions like what to eat or how many reps to do. There are also a decent number of customization options, like what range to generate random numbers in, or how to label the wheel. However, the randomness of this app means that there’s no logic behind these selections, so it won’t work well for decisions that require some deeper thought. Most people probably wouldn’t be comfortable using this app for more consequential decisions. From our team discussions, it seems unlikely that we’ll employ fully random decision making like this app, but we might borrow some aspects of spontaneity or group decisions.

Unique value proposition: a simple app that helps users randomly decide.

 

Best Decision, app

By Anooshree

I came across this app while reading this article from the NY Times that recommends straightforward tools for quickly making decisions. Best Decisions works similarly to FYI Decision in that it breaks down the decision-making process into simple steps, each of which require a brief user input. Best Decisions seems to target younger, more technically-literate individuals with frequent phone use throughout the day.

 

The final screen performs simple math to calculate the “accuracy” of each possible decision, which is just the relative weight of each choice. I enjoyed the breakdown of the decision-making process the app presented—it made me consider my choices more meaningfully, and I felt less stuck—but the final visualization was not very meaningful, and I wouldn’t trust this app to make more important decisions for me. A positive of the interface, however, is the fact that past decisions are stored for you right on the home screen, which makes returning to them easy, and I’m sure would come in handy when making repeated decisions, like what to eat for dinner, or how to travel to class.

Unique value proposition: A clean, straightforward interface for breaking down confusing decisions in a methodological manner.

 

IDK? Decision Maker, app

By Anooshree

The UI for IDK? allows users to create polls for basic yes or no decisions: after writing down a specific question, users can vote in polls—including their own—via a Likert scale and short response option. IDK? makes aggregating decisions easier, and visualizes responses with an appealing, unifying aesthetic. IDK? seems like a great fit for younger users (e.g. those in high school and college) who have a large social circle and to whom the aesthetic of the app would be appealing.

That being said, the Likert scale as a means for identifying pros and cons for each decision was a little reductive, and even with the short answer field, I’m not sure how useful my friends’ votes on my decisions would be. I could imagine users like myself preferring to talk out their decision-making rationale in person or over text rather than having to summarize their thoughts on a more public platform. Furthermore, very few of my daily decisions are simply yes or no questions—I’m not sure how this interface could expand to account for multiple options.

Unique value proposition: A fun, friendly way to poll friends and family on spur-of-the-moment decisions and see pros and cons quickly!

 

Pros-Cons, app

By Kaitlin

Pros-Cons is a simple app designed to help users make informed decisions by weighing the pros and cons of each decision. Within the app, the user can add decisions they would like to make, lists of advantages and disadvantages for them, weights for the advantages and disadvantages, and expiration dates for decisions. The app then analyzes what was entered and calculates a score for each decision, with a > 50% score being a suggestion that the user should take the decision. After making a decision, the user can set the status of it to be completed or discarded. There is also a collaboration feature that allows users to create decisions together.

The main strength of this app is in its concept of allowing users to visually weigh the pros and cons of their decisions. It also helps break the factors that go into making a decision down into simple pieces, which targets those who get overwhelmed by information when making decisions. Some standout features of this app in my opinion are the ability to add weights to decisions, the automatic score calculation, and the ability to make collaborative decisions with others. The score calculation is a unique feature that helps give users more confidence in their decision-making.

One weakness of this app though is that it’s not really made for comparing different decisions because of the pros/cons format, and is rather for choosing yes/no for a specific decision. This app’s format also makes for a slower decision-making process, which is something our group is trying to avoid. Our product would seek to improve on these weaknesses, allowing the user to compare different decisions quickly but effectively.

Unique value proposition: A simple app that allows users to visualize the pros and cons of a decision and receive a suggestion of what action to take.

 

Protagonist: Decision Making, app

By Kaitlin

Protagonist is an app that aims to help individuals make better decisions by leading them through a structured thought process. The app has templates the user can choose from for business/life decisions (e.g. where to live), but the user can also create a blank one for more customization. For each decision, the app allows the user to add the different choices they’re considering, what factors contribute to them, weights for the factors, and descriptions for the decisions and factors. For each choice in a decision, the user can also set the status of it to tentative, candidate, selected, or eliminated. Again, like Pros-Cons, there’s a collaboration feature that allows users to create shared decisions and work through them together. 

Some prominent strengths of this app are its structured approach to decision-making and its customizability, which is an important feature that targets people who like being structured in their thinking. The app has a lot of options you can modify to fit your needs, but it is still very clean, aesthetic, and easy to navigate. Other strengths include being able to track your progress in a decision by changing the status of choices, compare many different options at once, give weights to factors, and see a visualization of which choice in a decision is better. The templates are also a nice touch.

Because the app gives you the ability to input so much information though, I could see users getting overwhelmed by it. Having many inputs also leads to slower decision-making, which is not ideal for our group’s goals. For our product, our group could seek to follow this app’s UI and design, but make it a little simpler for everyday use.

Unique value proposition: A clean and aesthetic app that takes on a more structured approach to decision-making.

 

Chooser, app

By Cecilia

Everyone involved would place their finger on the screen and the app Chooser would select someone at random from among the options. You can also head to settings to change the number of winners that the app picks, but only up to 4 total. You can also customize the color of the app display according to your preference and the sound effects / vibrations. As seen below, the app opens with the screen and you can immediately place your figure to get the result selected by the app.

It was fairly easy to navigate as there were no extra buttons or pages. It brings the user straight to the meat of the app, which is convenient and efficient as a user who needs “someone” to decide something. People tend to utilize the app for selecting someone to make a decision when no one wants to. I personally use the app to make decisions in a group setting, but would not use it to make major decisions as I would need to consider the pros and cons more. There are nothing I would improve as I need nothing more then the app already has as someone who want a random decision made.

Unique value proposition: An efficient and user friendly app that allows users to quickly and easily decide.

 

Decisionize, website

By Cecilia

This is a website that would allow the users to insert the decisions as well as the pros and cons of making the decision, which the website would then turn these pros and cons into polls or little quizzes that you would answer to give you which choice has a higher net score. The website only has four pages: Instruction, Decisions, Pros and Cons, and Poll. It’s all self navigate, so the users would have to input all the information manually without much guidance.

The layout seems easy to navigate, but is a little sketchy and could be confusing as there is not much information that step by step shows you the process. It seems like it’s more based on self motivation. I would imagine that someone who really needs to lay out everything and is not in a rush to make a decision would take advantage of the website as the process is very time consuming. For instance, the poll is determined by how many decisions and pros and cons you list. If I were to input three decisions and two pros and cons, I would need to answer six poll questions. This number would double quickly the more information is inputted, which could cause inefficiencies. I would instead change the polls so that for which factor only one poll is asked. That way users would save much more time than the current design.

 

Definitive Choice, app

By Alahji

The app, Definitive Choice, offers a unique and engaging way to make decisions. It helps users overcome decision paralysis by providing a simple and intuitive tool to prioritize and weigh decision criteria. The targeted audience for the following app would be people who are interested in a more comprehensive way of making decisions that is supported by quantitative data. By using the pairwise comparison process, the app accurately calculates the weighting factors for each criteria and helps users evaluate their options based on their prioritized criteria. The app also provides the option to involve friends, family members, and colleagues in the decision-making process, adding a collaborative aspect to the decision-making process. While the app does provide a more methodical and rational way of making decisions through cost-benefit trade-offs, the platform could definitely be overwhelming to use by users. I had difficulty understanding the percentages of the pairwise comparison process and what it means as it relates to me making a decision. One way in which the following app could improve would be limiting the amount of friction it takes in using the app, such as assigning a score value to each decision that is being considered. Additionally, it would be helpful had there been a tutorial or walkthrough explaining the purpose of the different components of the app, such as the final percentage assigned to each decision.

 

Unique value proposition: A comprehensive and thoughtful way of making decisions through patented technology.

 

Pollsify, app

By Alahji

Pollsify is a user-friendly, Gen-Z app that enables you to conduct polls and gather opinions from either your friends or the general public. The targeted audience for the following app would be for Gen-Zers, particularly younger individuals who are interested in making low-stake decisions. With Pollsify, you can create both private and public polls, and share across various platforms to reach a wider audience. The app offers various features, such as the ability to add a question, a GIF or image, take a photo, or pin a location to your poll. The polls can either be multiple-choice text or emoji-based. The text-based option provides you with up to eight options per question, offering a conventional way to conduct a poll.

What makes Pollsify great is that it’s quite simple and effortless to use. Creating and sharing polls are quite intuitive and a seamless arrival. Additionally, users can easily access their polls on all of their devices. However, some limitations that were exhibited in the app is the UI/UX design. Some components to the app were quite outdated. Additionally, it was quite difficult to decipher the intent behind certain design choices. While the app introduces a fun element to decision-making, I do not see the platform in making important decisions. I would primarily use Pollsify to make low-stake decisions such as places to eat, for instance.

Unique value proposition: Pollsify is an effortless and entertaining way for making quick decisions with the help of your personal network and the global community.

Mapped Findings

After looking into these comparators, we decided to map them onto a 2×2 matrix to help visualize and compare them.

The location of where the competitors lie on the 2×2 reflects the process of deciding long-term vs short term. When individuals have to choose between options that would ultimately influence their way of life in the future, the process would often be more time consuming. While in comparison, deciding on little stuff more efficiently so that not much time is wasted is ideal for most people as there is no reason to spend long periods of time deciding little things that wouldn’t impact their life. With the research done so far, a concrete method isn’t defined in dealing with long-term decisions quickly. Therefore, that’s an option that our team could explore in building the prototype of the project. We are currently thinking of social aspects where users could utilize their surroundings and network to assist them in making decisions. In addition, we want to introduce an aspect that would build confidence in user’s decisions. This would make our product position near the center, but depending on the changes made in the future, the position could also shift. One way in which the following app could improve would be to allow users to see which item did friends vote on, as this would allow for followup conversations to carry either on or off the app, for further in-depth explanations of friends’ rationale.