WHAT AM I WAITING FOR? [STUDENT PROJECT]

Role    |    Team Lead, Researcher

Problem    |    There is a category of decisions that are: irreversible (or expensive to reverse), socially and emotionally complex, we don’t make them often enough in life to get really good at them, there’s no hard deadline so it’s easy to procrastinate (or decide not to decide yet). These decisions are inherently difficult to make. How can we help people make these decisions by enabling them to learn from past experiences and get in touch with the meaning and significance of the small but relevant decisions they make every day?

Process    |    We conducted a review of the existing decision making apps on the market, trying them ourselves, as well as collecting feedback from people who've used them, through interviews and surveys, in order to gain insights into why the apps may or may not have worked for them. We identified that these apps:

• assume the user has decided a decision is needed, has pondered all the possible options, and is simply needing support in choosing between them
• don't support decision-making for what feel like non-urgent decisions
• don't allow for a combination of emotional and logical reasoning
• don't take into consideration the granularity and contextual specificity of individual experience
• don't help the user understand the rationale behind her priorities
• don't utilize past experiences and decisions

We set out to design an app built on principles from behavioral sciences that would address those gaps. We built paper prototypes and conducted user think-alouds to gain insight into whether our design might work for people. 

Methods    |    Interviews, Surveys, Paper prototyping