Decision Making
This can be sometimes the toughest part in the design process. You have two equally good ideas, that lead down two seperate paths and you must choose. It is either option A, or option B, not both. I experienced this in Praxis 2 when our group was trying to decide on a solution to help Senior Anomic Aphasia Patients improve the speech capabilities. Do we either make a card-based solution or do we try to make a "21st century" internet based solution.
The following methods are the ways that I have found helpful in coming to a decision.
Pugh Chart
This is a staple in the process of decision making. It is a very simple and intuitive process where you write all of our solutions down and then compare tham against a reference solution.
Thinking 6 Hats
Before one begins making an important decision, I believe it is essential to try understand as many points of view as possible. It is can be easy to come up with a solution that solves a certain facet of the problem (or helps a certain group) while accidentally ignoring the other equally important aspects to the problem. A common business strategy is to use "Thinking 6 Hats" [6],[7]. This is where you have 6 different hats that each represent a point of view such as fiscal, environmental, analytical, etc. The aim of this is to ensure that you have considered all the angles and make a fully informed decision. I have adapted this decision making tool called the "Thinking 6 Hats" by instead having the designer have 6 hats which are people affected by the solution. Before making a decision, it is essential to ensure as many possible views have been explored to ensure your solution will be the most beneficial to the maxiumum number of people.
As an example of this is in Praxis 2. The very first thing we
did was outlay all possible "stakeholders" involved in helping
the Senior Anomic Aphasia patients improve the communication
abilities. Our list included "the cargivers, the Communicative
Disorders Assistants, the friends of Anomic Aphasia patients,
York Durham Aphasia Centre (and other institutions, the app
developpers working on smartphone accessories, professors
and researchers in the field" and many more. This is why my team's RFP (figure 1) spends over 2 pages outlying the various stakeholders. Understanding who is affected garners a better understanding of the problem and then when using other decision tools, enables the designer to have a more accurate picture of what is really valued.
Figure 1: Praxis 2 RFP Table of Contents Stakeholder Section [8].
I personally like the Pugh Chart not because of the score itself, rather the throught process it make the designer go through. It forces you to consider all of your criteria rather than just be megalomaniac on one criteria and ignore the rest. After the ranking, it is then important to consider why a certain design is below the reference solution and if it is possible to encorporate another solution in order to make the "new solution" score above the reference solution.
In the end, I believe it is best not to take the score very seriously. Rather, use it as an indicator as to which design has some strong concepts and see how to encorporate it into what you believe is a good design. For example, in our early stages, having an online chatroulette for Anomic Aphasia patients scored well on the Pugh Chart (see figure 2) and other MCDM (Multi-Criteria Desicion Analysis). This is obviously a flawed solution, but I used the concept of a conversation-based solution and encorporated that into our final design of a card game. This encorporation is important to achieve a strong well rounded solution.
Figure 2: Pugh Chart example done in Praxis Studio [9]
Pros and Cons
Making a Pros and Cons table is taught to children at a very young age and isn't something one usually associates with making Engineering decisions but I personally believe it to be very helpful. A pros and cons table forces the designer to go through the rigor of finding an exact element of a good solution that he does not like as well as taking a poor solution and finding what they do like. No solution is perfect and this forces the designer to confront aspects of their preferred design that are not as strong as they could be. I have done a pros and cons table (such as figure 3) for almost any decision I make.
To see merit in a bad idea, or to see a flaw in a good idea is essential if you want to achieve the best possible design.
Figure 3: Pros and Cons Table used to help decide which solution is best. [10]
These are the tools that I have found most helpful in making the best decision possible. Please note that there is still the designer's gut feeling or intuition which is a powerful thing. A pros and cons table, a pugh chart and many other helping tools can sometimes point to a solution that you do not believe is good. Question yourself why this solution ranks so high, but don't let the ranking be the sole reason why you choose it. You should stay true to what you believe is the best design. I believe all of these tools aren't that much about the end "numbers", rather they are about the process going through to get those end results.
References Used on this Page:
[6] 6 Thinking Hats, The deBono Group, [online] 2005, http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php (Accessed: April 16th)
[7] 6 Thinking Hats,Mind Tools, [online] 2004 http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm (Accessed: April 16th)
[8] University of Toronto Praxis 2, "Praxis 2", 2014, Matthew McLeod Liam MacKichan Jannis Mei Christopher Rockx, March 2014
[9] University of Toronto Praxis 2, "Praxis 2", 2014, Matthew McLeod, March 2014
[10] University of Toronto Praxis 2, "Praxis 2", 2014, Matthew McLeod, March 2014.