Thunk, thunk, thunk! - That's the sound of me pounding my head against the wall in disbelief ;)

OK. I'm having a bit of fun at Peter's expense, since he deleted my comment with any communication to me. Me bad.

Seriously though, I'm not sure what to say that will be helpful. If you want to understand decision making to the point where you can assist it by design, get a descent education in psychology and sociology.

Luckily, design can be done iteratively, and with some good testing, can lead to fairly good designs. A few guidelines to start when trying to assist decision-making:

Decision-making is inherently satisficing. People rush to a solution with the available information they have at hand (often no more than hunches or intuitions) and unless they are very careful or are working in a domain where it is readily apparent that a solution is wrong, they will stick with their solution.

There's a large and well-developed body of literature on how to influence decision-making. I recommend Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, ISBN 0716731088. There's another that MadMan has recommended a few times that I need to get. He's mentioned it on WebWord but I'm not finding it...

More later...

Posted by: Ron Zeno on July 7, 2003 10:52 PM

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Ron, the book that MadMan has recommended is Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B Cialdini.

This was referenced in the My Eight Favorite Usability Books Thread from November 2002.

I have spent the past 10 years building software that helps people feel comfortable about buying a financial product, be it a mortgage, unsecured loan, savings account or insurance product. We have found that if you give the user something 'solid' like a personalised illustration to start with, they will then play around with the quote to see the effect of changing different parameters of the product.

Posted by: Mac on July 8, 2003 03:23 AM

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Hola champs.

Sorry for not posting or commenting of late, but I've been unbelievably busy with my new business venture. Checking email and surfing is restricted to an hour or two at late night.

Thanks Mac. Yes, that is indeed the book I recommended. I'm very interested in the topic of influencing and persuading people (in both good and bad ways.)

Since Ron mentioned satisficing, you might also be interested in checking out Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein. Another useful book based on a lot of research.

Posted by: MadMan on July 8, 2003 02:55 PM

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Thanks Mac and Madman!

More guidelines:

Educate people on what they need to know to make a good decision, and how they can assess their decision (and the trustworthiness of the information they use).

Provide people with the information they need to make the decision.

(As Mac points out) Provide them with a means to assess their decision.

Finally, decision-making is extremely complicated and extremely varied depending upon context. Looking for simple patterns that model decision making is absurd without focusing on a specific context.

Posted by: Ron Zeno on July 8, 2003 11:46 PM

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