Problem Formulation

The first stage focuses on understanding and structuring the decision-making problem. Participants should resist the urge to immediately design charts, dashboards, or interfaces.

In the double diamond framing, this stage corresponds to moving from a broad, ambiguous situation toward a clearer definition of the decision problem.

Step 1: Identify the Top-Level Decision

Participants begin by reading the scenario brief.

The goal is to understand:

• who the decision-maker is,
• what decision they need to make,
• what options or entities are involved,
• what data is available,
• what constraints matter,
• and what makes the decision difficult.

Ask:

What is the main decision the user needs to make?

Then classify it as choose, activate, or create.

Home-buying Example

The top-level decision is:

Which home should the buyer choose?

In the typology, this is a choose task.

The user is choosing one final home from a set of candidate listings. The interface therefore needs to support comparison, prioritization, justification, and tradeoff reasoning.

Choose final home