Problem Formulation Discussion
After completing the group modeling exercise, volunteers will be invited to briefly present their decision diagrams. Each group will describe: After completing the group modeling exercise, volunteers will be invited to briefly present their decision diagrams. Each group will describe:
- Their high-level structure: What is the top-level decision? What sub-decisions support it?
- How they composed choose, activate, and create tasks to capture the decision workflow.
- Challenges encountered while modeling (e.g., ambiguity between tasks, uncertainty in structuring loops).
Depending on the amount of time left, we will then facilitate a guided discussion focusing on the following key reflection points:
- Expressiveness: How easily were participants able to represent their decision-making problem using only choose, activate, and create? Did the typology help clarify the information flow and dependencies in the decision?
- Composability and Hierarchy: How did participants decompose high-level decisions into subtasks? Did their diagrams naturally show hierarchical levels of reasoning (e.g., Level 1 overarching goal, Level 2 supporting decisions)?
- Correctness and Fit: Were there any parts of the problem that felt difficult to capture with the three decision tasks? Were there cases where participants debated whether an action was best represented as activate versus choose, for example?
- Externalization and Reflection: Did diagramming the decision problem help participants surface implicit assumptions, iterative loops, or missing steps they hadn’t initially considered?
- Flexibility and Multiple Reasoning Styles: How did participants’ approaches vary (e.g., top-down vs bottom-up)?
- Connection to the participants’ work: In participants’ own projects, where might modeling the decision-making structure with this typology help define problems more clearly, clarify goals, or structure user interactions? What aspects of a decision-making problem could become easier to externalize or communicate by starting with a decision diagram?