Step 5 - Reflection | DM Typology

Step 5: Reflection

After sketching, participants should compare their interface against their decision diagram.

Ask:

Does every major decision in the diagram have design support?
Are there interface elements that do not support any decision?
Are the most important decisions visually emphasized?
Are supporting decisions placed in the right sequence?
Are loops and revisions supported?
Does the interface preserve expert judgment?
Does the design help the user explain the final decision?

This step helps participants avoid designing attractive but poorly aligned visualization systems.

Home-buying Example

When designing the homebuying decision-support tool, ask:

What is the final decision the buyer needs to make?
What candidate homes already exist?
Where do users need to create new derived attributes or affordability estimates?
Which constraints are hard requirements?
Which criteria are negotiable preferences?
Which homes are removed by each constraint?
Where do buyers need to compare tradeoffs?
Where should uncertainty from affordability or fit estimates be shown?
How should household disagreement be represented?
Where should the interface support revising criteria or regenerating options?
What evidence should be saved to justify the final decision?

Summary

The collaborative homebuying example illustrates how the typology can guide visualization design after problem formulation.

The top-level decision is to choose a final home. However, that choice depends on earlier create tasks, such as generating candidate homes and estimating affordability, and activate tasks, such as filtering homes by constraints and household acceptability.

By representing these tasks in a decision diagram, designers can identify what kinds of interface support are needed: recommendation tools, filters, affordability views, tradeoff visualizations, household preference views, comparison tools, and final selection mechanisms.

This makes the typology useful not only for describing decision-making, but also for carrying the structure of a decision problem into visualization design.