There’s a new decision support tool out, developed by Ali Abbas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by an NSF award:
It’s a very rich tool, so check it out for yourself! This review is only based on a test run I did on parts of it.
When first looking at it, and reading the NSF report, where Ali describes the application as a “‘Facebook for Decision-Making”, I thought that it was just an aggregation (however sophisticated) of our friends’ or stranger’s opinions, which I would not find too exciting.
However, I did a test run with a random decision, and found that the program can be used quite independently of the social network aspects. It does actually walk you through a process of thinking your decision through (listing alternatives, goals, pros and cons, uncertainties, even asking some bigger picture questions and offering me additional information based on my keywords). It also gives you feedback on how to think deeper at each of those steps. I imagine that this part alone could already be quite useful in a difficult decision situation, by helping people think their concerns through systematically.
If you keep going, the program will then offer you several forms of analysis, such as decision trees and “weight and rate”. Those are rather sophisticated forms of analysis, and I was impressed by how the program was relatively easy to use despite the depth of the process. Some aspects might be hard to understand, especially in the decision tree analysis, and the possibilities of just playing around with it and figuring it out are somewhat limited, because you can’t always go back easily, without restarting the whole analysis. But overall this is one of best online decision tools I have seen.
I would love to hear your experiences if you’re trying it!