Do it, an app that makes the right decision.
For my senior project, I designed and developed an iOS app to combine my interests in Software Development, UI design, and Psychology.
What is the problem?
Decision making is important but hard. Choosing one way or the other might have very big impacts and serious consequences. And considering and weighing of the benefits and costs of choices can be a long and difficult process. Very often, we know what is the right thing to do deep down in our hearts, but how would we uncover the answers? How can we make decisions both rationally and confidently?
How can we solve it?
This app utilizes Pros and Cons to gather information about each alternative and uses Pairwise Comparisons to quantify how important each factor means to the decision maker. This approach breaks the multi-dimensional problem down into many one-dimensional decisions. Information about the importance of each Factor is extracted and the final decision suggestion is based on the weighted importance of all of the Factors.
For detailed explaination of the algorithm and the making of the app, see this presentation and my thesis.
Demo
This is a sweet little film I made to show what the app can do. Hope you like it!
Do it! is on its way to the App Store. SEE YOU SOON!
App Overview and Design
Creating Pros & Cons Lists
First step is to create Pros & Cons Lists for the two choices. This is a process to help users think through what factors matter in this decision.
To make this process easy and intuitive:
1) users can can create the lists for both options on a single page by simply tap on the option
2) short tap brings up the keyboard, long tap enables Speech to Text
3) During input, users may flag each factor Pros or Cons by inputing keywords ("I like", "I don't like") or choosing from the thumb up or thumb down.
Pairwise Comparisons
Second step is to do pairwise comparisons. The app will generate rounds of comparisons based on input order, current weight ranking and random generations. No pair will be comapred twice and some factors that are repetitively unimportant will be elmimate from the comparison in the later stage.
In order to not exhaust the users in the comparison while retaining the legitimicy of the comparison results, the number of comparisons needed will be determined after user testing with prototype.
Result
At the end, the app will compute the score for each choice and make a suggestion. The scores are computed using the sets of comparisons by combining each factor's average weight with their intra- and inter-choice importance measured with PageRank algorithm.
Users will be able to see the break down by tapping the score bubbles.
More to Come Soon!
This app is a work in progress. Early prototype will be done in December and the final app should be ready by May. More detail to come soon!