I love tools like this. Thanks for sharing it. It's nice to go through a process like that and feel extra-good about your decision. :-)
It reminds me of a tool I used some time ago, the "Oracle" script at SimilarMinds.com. One difference is that the Oracle script used forced-choice based on baked-in global factors, even including how much a decision would affect your social standing, for example.
Thanks for sharing! I'm glad it's useful :) I originally made it because I wasn't feeling confident in a direction I was about to take in life. I wrote it all down in a spreadsheet and actually changed my mind after doing a similar process!
That's super cool. A friend was just asking me "how do you use numbers to weigh decisions again" and we laughed at the synchronicity when I sent her your link and she read the title. Thanks again.
I don't know why, but I was expecting this to just take a list of choices and decide on one randomly, with the idea that sometimes making a choice is more important than what choice is made. I know there are times where I've gotten stuck on something because I couldn't make my mind up on retrospectively, relatively unimportant decisions.
Tip: if you input something and press "enter", it will reset the form. You should attach the event listener to the form's onSubmit, and not to the button's onClick.
It'd also be nice if after submitting for one and selecting enter that it autofocuses on the input for the next question so you can start typing without clicking on it.
Not that granular yet, but I’ve been capturing user story/ acceptance criteria level best practices. Currently at ~800 B2B focused modular “specs” that find the middle ground between devs and non technical team members.
My email in profile if you’d like to check it out.
Not that I know of. I learned through years of practice and reading hundreds of varied blog posts. If you find a book or resource like that please ping me.
You might notice by just using the web, or you might notice it when testing the form on one of your first assignments, that you can submit a form by pressing enter in an input box.
And then realize that adding the onclick handler on the submit button handles one use case (clicking the button), but a more general solution would be to add the onclick handlers on the form itself.
Then maybe you start thinking, huh, what happens when someone tabs to a button and presses enter, does the onclick handler work there? And so on and so on...
So the answer for where it's written down, it's in the documentation. But most people these days can't be bothered with things like reading documentation and textbooks and reference manuals, so, uh, I guess you just need to have a little bit of experience combined with an attention to detail?
or better yet, don't even use <form> for things that don't submit a traditional old-style POST/GET to a server. if you're handling all your logic in javascript on the client side, OR doing everything with AJAJ [0], <form> is unnecessary and you can handle things with button.onClick -- you get to program it just like any other GUI.
[0] most people use JSON not XML so i prefer to call it AJAJ not AJAX
There are some downsides to that approach. The <form> element has semantic meaning which is lost if it's missing. Screen readers for blind people, browser features such as form auto-fill etc. might not work as expected without this semantic information.
Most web applications I have seen opt to use the form element. The default form browser behaviour can be suppressed easily.
That's pretty cool and a really intuitive way of decision making. I think I like that style of reasoning slightly better than a good old fashioned pro and cons list, forcing you to rank is really helpful. Cool stuff!
This is pretty awesome. I just used this to help consider what to get my mom for mother's day. I think the most value comes from actually enumerating your options and considering what's important. It's interesting to get the algorithm's perspective, but I think I settled on a different choice after working through it.
It would be nice to be able to go back and fix mistakes. For instance, on the first pass after entering something to consider I pressed Enter. I didn't even notice the "important" radio button, so the first choice got "somewhat important". It was actually super important and there was seemingly no way to fix it.
My need for the back button was that I clicked "that's enough to consider" when I was done entering things, and immediately realized you wanted me to click "submit", then "that's enough to consider". So the last choice I entered didn't get considered.
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I was thinking about making something like this, but I never actually started to seriously evaluate the idea.
I guess it would be cool to collaborate with other people on this project though.
Anyone remember letsimondecide.com? Early 2010's, it did this and was aiming to be acquired like hunch.com was apparently (I hadn't heard of hunch.com). I think it never happened and it eventually went inactive.
This is cool. It looks like this is a program for creating and evaluating a decision matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix. This got me thinking about an idea for a similar tool, but catered to a specific domain, one that can be populated with data to help make the decision -- e.g., where to live, where to go to dinner, what kind of car to buy, etc. A decision where the options have known important criteria and quantifiable values, e.g. a decision about where to live has criteria like cost of living, crime rate, walk score, etc. Essentially, it would be like criteria filters you commonly see on shopping websites except it would let you rank those filtering criteria as well.
I just stumbled upon a product that helps solve decision making problems while looking for info on the "Rete algorithm" [1].
On that note, it is pretty cool that you made a V1 and just released it. If it was me I would get lost in a bread first search of algorithms and prior art and whatnot :-p
Rete algorithm - famous in business rules engines, forward chaining, backward chaining, inference engines - all fun topics in the field of expert systems. Much of it, however, left behind in the pursuit of more complex machine learning and AI approaches, as of late.
I did a lot of work/research in this area while working for a fraud detection company.
You might be interested in an old public domain tool called CLIPS that NASA released many years ago [1]. It is a lot of fun and amazingly powerful, albeit, I don’t hear much about it anymore. Still works though!
I've been pondering the idea if software can help us to make decisions in the way you have shown here for a while. If you (or anyone else) would like to have an exchange about it, my email is in my profile.
Another idea: it might be too touchy of a subject but a little tool that helps resolve conflict between two parties is something I’ve always wanted to see.
Just a simple tool to help move forward on a decision. Objectivity-as-a-service for consensus building (though whether consensus building is always the right tool is a separate debate.)
In fact after typing all this I feel like Help Me Decide Please could just as easily be used by two people, as an effective tool. Help us decide! I’ll try and see how it works!
Reminds me of /r/amitheasshole - can someone in an emotionally convoluted/charged situation figure out if they are objectively (by judgment of strangers) being an ass. Obviously there is a ton of bias based on how the OP presents a situation, but the idea of getting an outside opinion has already proved popular.
This would've been great a few days ago when I was making officer decisions for a student club of mine. I had it narrowed down to approximately 10 candidates but the process after that was painful due to the balancing of factors like technical expertise, leadership experience, free time, etc.
Seems pretty cool. I originally thought from the name that this would post the questions and then let users vote on them, but this is well-made.
As a note, your label for the highest level of importance should be for="factor-weight-4", currently two labels point at for="factor-weight-3". This means the wrong radio button is selected if you click that label. But props to you for actually using labels and inputs properly so you don't have to try to click on a tiny radio button.
I'm sorry to say this, but, this is not so very good.
Having worked with other decision methods such as TOPSIS, AHP, and ANP, and note that those are the simplest and most commented on (and not about its features, but about its shortcomings), in your analysis/software, it is impossible to compare choices among them, which is a huge hindrance to the method.
Remember once again, AHP/ANP are not the most 'useful' ones, having advantages and drawbacks, but they are a good starting point on Multicriteria Decision Methods (MCDM).
You may want to check MAUT/MAVT, PROMETHEE, VIKOR, Best Worst Method, and TOPSIS (this one is quite simple to understand and use).
I would add one more step at the very end.. a feedback/rating question - either simply “Did this help you decide?” Yes or no, and “was it a good/right decision?” Yes or no. “Which one did you ultimately decide”? Or you could add likert scale rating... but I like that you kept the tool simple.
I could see this being mined/modeled later using machine learning, natural language, market basket analysis, a whole bunch of things, to try to help people make decisions. You must have thought about those possibilities.
Have you read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman?
They gave him a Nobel for tackling decision problems. I guess that's one important problem to humanity in general.
I put in “where should I run?” just to get past that first stage to see what would happen next and ended up going through the whole process. Really simple, kinda fun, thanks!
91 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadIt reminds me of a tool I used some time ago, the "Oracle" script at SimilarMinds.com. One difference is that the Oracle script used forced-choice based on baked-in global factors, even including how much a decision would affect your social standing, for example.
Thanks for sharing.
My email in profile if you’d like to check it out.
So then you might look up the documentation for the submit event on forms: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastr...
And then realize that adding the onclick handler on the submit button handles one use case (clicking the button), but a more general solution would be to add the onclick handlers on the form itself.
Then maybe you start thinking, huh, what happens when someone tabs to a button and presses enter, does the onclick handler work there? And so on and so on...
So the answer for where it's written down, it's in the documentation. But most people these days can't be bothered with things like reading documentation and textbooks and reference manuals, so, uh, I guess you just need to have a little bit of experience combined with an attention to detail?
[0] most people use JSON not XML so i prefer to call it AJAJ not AJAX
Most web applications I have seen opt to use the form element. The default form browser behaviour can be suppressed easily.
It would be nice to be able to go back and fix mistakes. For instance, on the first pass after entering something to consider I pressed Enter. I didn't even notice the "important" radio button, so the first choice got "somewhat important". It was actually super important and there was seemingly no way to fix it.
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URL: helpmedecideplease.com/
Category: gambling
It's a serious question. Unless the "staying alive" criterion has no value to you.
I can't even decide what to put in the choices list. Man.
that’d be a nice play project for phoenix and liveview!
"what question should I ask? and what should the answers be?"
[0] - http://www.hichapp.com/
On that note, it is pretty cool that you made a V1 and just released it. If it was me I would get lost in a bread first search of algorithms and prior art and whatnot :-p
1: https://www.sparklinglogic.com/smarts-decision-manager/
I did a lot of work/research in this area while working for a fraud detection company.
You might be interested in an old public domain tool called CLIPS that NASA released many years ago [1]. It is a lot of fun and amazingly powerful, albeit, I don’t hear much about it anymore. Still works though!
[1] http://www.clipsrules.net/
I've been pondering the idea if software can help us to make decisions in the way you have shown here for a while. If you (or anyone else) would like to have an exchange about it, my email is in my profile.
Another idea: it might be too touchy of a subject but a little tool that helps resolve conflict between two parties is something I’ve always wanted to see.
Just a simple tool to help move forward on a decision. Objectivity-as-a-service for consensus building (though whether consensus building is always the right tool is a separate debate.)
In fact after typing all this I feel like Help Me Decide Please could just as easily be used by two people, as an effective tool. Help us decide! I’ll try and see how it works!
As a note, your label for the highest level of importance should be for="factor-weight-4", currently two labels point at for="factor-weight-3". This means the wrong radio button is selected if you click that label. But props to you for actually using labels and inputs properly so you don't have to try to click on a tiny radio button.
Remember once again, AHP/ANP are not the most 'useful' ones, having advantages and drawbacks, but they are a good starting point on Multicriteria Decision Methods (MCDM).
You may want to check MAUT/MAVT, PROMETHEE, VIKOR, Best Worst Method, and TOPSIS (this one is quite simple to understand and use).
I could see this being mined/modeled later using machine learning, natural language, market basket analysis, a whole bunch of things, to try to help people make decisions. You must have thought about those possibilities.
It’s a cool tool/idea!
A link to a personal website or Twitter profile would be nice.
[1] https://easydecisionmaker.com/
Funny I did basically the same app as everyone for the ever common problem of deciding where to go to lunch at work.
https://ploufplouf.funkybits.fr
It was a long time ago to try AngularJS (the new hotness of 2012), Less, and eventually Redis.