
Show HN: Help Me Decide Please - tannerljohnson
http://helpmedecideplease.com
======
scrollaway
I absolutely thought I could enter a question and have the site's users decide
for me like a strawpoll.

I can't even decide what to put in the choices list. Man.

~~~
barbs
Legit was what I was thinking. I want to make this.

~~~
tillcarlos
after reading yesterday’s posts here:

that’d be a nice play project for phoenix and liveview!

~~~
riantogo
Link please

~~~
garrettgrimsley
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22947341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22947341)

------
adamcharnock
Way back when I worked on a lifestyle coaching startup based on these methods.

I was the tech guy, working with a coach. The term we used for this method was
Weighted Attribute Matrix. The coach had already implemented it as a
spreadsheet which he would use as a tool with his clients. He therefore had a
(big) pre-created list of criteria, such as “Allows me to spend time with my
family”.

Each client would the list the options they were trying to choose between, and
then go through the process of 1) weighting the criteria, and 2) scoring the
criteria against their choices.

This would take a day or two to do with his clients, and was tedious.

The software we created streamlined all those. First they weighted the
criteria, at which point we could then ignore all the criteria the client
didn’t care about.

We also drastically improved the interface, and used a bit of UX & phycology
to make it a bit addictive. This helped users get through it quickly. I think
we got initial results down to 30 mins which was kinda revolutionary for his
practice. This software was used in workshops/1-to-1 sessions, not self-guided
SaaS-style (although we were considering it)

In the end nothing came of it. I think we fell down on the selling and
marketing. Sharing the story here in case it is useful.

Incidentally, I also used this process when buying some land a few years ago.
Multiple people had to choose, so we each had a Weighted Attribute Matrix to
fill out. I then put it into a Django app and we could see where the
disagreements & commonalities lay.

What was especially cool was that people could get a rough idea of how much
they would personally like the land without having to visit it.

------
raister
I'm sorry to say this, but, this is not so very good. Having worked with other
decision methods such as TOPSIS, AHP, and ANP, and note that those are the
simplest and most commented on (and not about its features, but about its
shortcomings), in your analysis/software, it is impossible to compare choices
among them, which is a huge hindrance to the method.

~~~
copperx
Is there a good introduction to decision methods on general like the ones you
describe? I'm very interested in this.

~~~
raister
Yes. I like this paper
([https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02196220185...](https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219622018500360))
because it explains in general terms what AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) is
and related tools. In Google Scholar there are pointers to other researchers,
for AHP the most cited one is Thomas Saaty -
[https://scholar.google.com.br/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=s...](https://scholar.google.com.br/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=saaty&btnG=)

Remember once again, AHP/ANP are not the most 'useful' ones, having advantages
and drawbacks, but they are a good starting point on Multicriteria Decision
Methods (MCDM).

You may want to check MAUT/MAVT, PROMETHEE, VIKOR, Best Worst Method, and
TOPSIS (this one is quite simple to understand and use).

------
franciscop
Tip: if you input something and press "enter", it will reset the form. You
should attach the event listener to the form's onSubmit, and not to the
button's onClick.

~~~
joppy
Is there some book of best web dev practices where stuff like this is written
down?

~~~
jmchuster
You might notice by just using the web, or you might notice it when testing
the form on one of your first assignments, that you can submit a form by
pressing enter in an input box.

So then you might look up the documentation for the submit event on forms:
[https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-
infrastr...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-
infrastructure.html#implicit-submission)

And then realize that adding the onclick handler on the submit button handles
one use case (clicking the button), but a more general solution would be to
add the onclick handlers on the form itself.

Then maybe you start thinking, huh, what happens when someone tabs to a button
and presses enter, does the onclick handler work there? And so on and so on...

So the answer for where it's written down, it's in the documentation. But most
people these days can't be bothered with things like reading documentation and
textbooks and reference manuals, so, uh, I guess you just need to have a
little bit of experience combined with an attention to detail?

------
Waterluvian
This site is fun but I think it fails to understand what's difficult about
making decisions for many people. The site asks you to make a LOT of
decisions.

~~~
elcomet
It asks you to make even more decisions than the original one.

------
dilippkumar
Here’s my output for trying to figure out what I am going to do for dinner:

    
    
        1. pizza: 54
        2. beer: 54
        3. italian: 45
        4. home cooked food: 44
        5. thai: 42
        6. mexican: 34
    

It’s fair to say the quality of the decisions this tool will enable is bounded
by the ability of the user to make good decisions :-)

~~~
copperx
Why is food made by strangers even an option in this pandemic?

It's a serious question. Unless the "staying alive" criterion has no value to
you.

~~~
neurotrace
So far there is no evidence of transmission via food delivery.

------
TeMPOraL
I like this idea in general (I have an Android app that does the same thing as
your page, except it uses draggable sliders).

Here are some things I believe you could improve about the implementation:

\- There's no explanation behind the math of weighing that's done. "these
scores were calculated based on your ratings for each choice and the weight
you gave to each factor" isn't an explanation. "(e.g., "super important" has a
weight of 4 and "not that important" has a weight of 1)" doesn't tell me why
my choice of one "super important" and one "not that important" gives me the
score of _14_. Not knowing the math you're doing makes me not trust the
result. I mean, I suspect you're doing "sum of factors multiplied by weights",
but a non-math-savvy person may take a while to figure where the numbers come
from.

\- Too many pages. I know you're aiming for dead simple (technically) UI, but
I think it would be better if I could enter choices and factors on the same
page.

\- I'd consider changing the factor score UI from:

    
    
      - ( ) 4 (best)
      - ( ) 3
      - (x) 2
      - ( ) 1 (worst)
    

into something inline, like:

    
    
      4 - best: ( ) ( ) (x) ( ) :1 - worst
    

People are used into this into (that's how you rate stuff on most pages on the
Internet), and it will cut your use of vertical space by at least a factor of
4, and also make it more readable - with this, it would be easier to compare
between factors and across options.

\--

Quite honestly, a perfect incarnation of this idea to me would be _a
spreadsheet_. This problem domain naturally fits into a shape like this:

    
    
      What should I eat tonight?
    
      | Option x Factor   | Effort | Taste | Biosafety || SCORE |
      | Factor weitht     |      2 |     3 |         4 ||       |
      |-------------------|--- ----|-------|-----------||-------|
      | Turkey sandwich   |      3 |     2 |         3 ||    24 |
      | Pizza (delivery)  |      4 |     4 |         1 ||    24 |
      | Pizza (homemade)  |      1 |     2 |         4 ||    27 |
      | Chicken soup      |      2 |     3 |         4 ||    29 | < PICK ME
    

A spreadsheet interface would make this tool _much_ more convenient, and
offers plenty of opportunities for futzing with UI (color coding, sliders for
input, whatnot).

Something I think you should consider for version 2.0 or as an alternative to
test out. Hell, I think I'll make myself one in Excel right now.

~~~
fortydegrees
I'm pretty good at UX and I don't have any issues with the current experience.
It actually really helped me for my use case.

I wouldn't use a spreadsheet. While I clicked 'How was this calculated?', I
realised I didn't care.

Your mistake is thinking the purpose of the app is to give the user the
perfect objective recommendation. For most decisions, you just want some kind
of psychological justification - for some people that can even be a coin flip.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The "objective recommendation" and "just psychological justification" groups
seem to me a _vastly_ different target audiences. For the latter, this tool is
already overcomplicated; it could be done as a list of input fields and a
button that highlights one of them at random.

I'm glad the tool helped in your case. I can imagine it helping in mine once,
but me getting immediately frustrated. In my own philosophy of UX, I generally
don't care much about tools you're only going to use once in your life; I
focus on ones that you're going to use repeatedly. Repeated use has different
priorities - in particular, efficiency over hand holding.

------
tphn
Nice job, it looks very simple and useful.

Decisions that involve multiple options and criteria (like comparison
shopping) are difficult because of your limited working memory. That's where
techniques like these are valuable, especially if you can simplify the UX and
explain how the magic happens, which this app does well.

I enjoy using hobby projects to learn new programming languages and
frameworks. My favorite one is called "dcidr" which is a similar decision-
making app that uses a prioritization/decision matrix under the hood. I've
rebuilt it many times since 2001 in PHP, Java, XAML, Ruby, JS, Rust, and so
on. It's great fun.

The current version is a PWA that uses Blazor (.NET web assembly) which was
awesome to work with, but it's still in preview and the download is pretty
huge:

[https://dcidr.z20.web.core.windows.net/](https://dcidr.z20.web.core.windows.net/)

Enjoy! There are links in the footer if you want to reach out.

------
ALittleLight
This is pretty awesome. I just used this to help consider what to get my mom
for mother's day. I think the most value comes from actually enumerating your
options and considering what's important. It's interesting to get the
algorithm's perspective, but I think I settled on a different choice after
working through it.

------
KhoomeiK
This would've been great a few days ago when I was making officer decisions
for a student club of mine. I had it narrowed down to approximately 10
candidates but the process after that was painful due to the balancing of
factors like technical expertise, leadership experience, free time, etc.

------
vikramkr
That's pretty cool and a really intuitive way of decision making. I think I
like that style of reasoning slightly better than a good old fashioned pro and
cons list, forcing you to rank is really helpful. Cool stuff!

------
sixdimensional
I would add one more step at the very end.. a feedback/rating question -
either simply “Did this help you decide?” Yes or no, and “was it a good/right
decision?” Yes or no. “Which one did you ultimately decide”? Or you could add
likert scale rating... but I like that you kept the tool simple.

I could see this being mined/modeled later using machine learning, natural
language, market basket analysis, a whole bunch of things, to try to help
people make decisions. You must have thought about those possibilities.

It’s a cool tool/idea!

------
gorgoiler
Whoa this is fantastic.

Another idea: it might be too touchy of a subject but a little tool that helps
resolve conflict between two parties is something I’ve always wanted to see.

Just a simple tool to help move forward on a decision. Objectivity-as-a-
service for consensus building (though whether consensus building is always
the right tool is a separate debate.)

In fact after typing all this I feel like _Help Me Decide Please_ could just
as easily be used by two people, as an effective tool. Help us decide! I’ll
try and see how it works!

~~~
gtm1260
Reminds me of /r/amitheasshole - can someone in an emotionally
convoluted/charged situation figure out if they are objectively (by judgment
of strangers) being an ass. Obviously there is a ton of bias based on how the
OP presents a situation, but the idea of getting an outside opinion has
already proved popular.

------
JoshuaDavid
Seems pretty cool. I originally thought from the name that this would post the
questions and then let users vote on them, but this is well-made.

As a note, your label for the highest level of importance should be
for="factor-weight-4", currently two labels point at for="factor-weight-3".
This means the wrong radio button is selected if you click that label. But
props to you for actually using labels and inputs properly so you don't have
to try to click on a tiny radio button.

~~~
tannerljohnson
thanks for the feedback! should be fixed now :)

------
garaetjjte
With this sort of analysis I always feel like: [https://external-
preview.redd.it/DodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrP...](https://external-
preview.redd.it/DodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrPo3P2T0taaK-
lgJCo.png?auto=webp&s=c180684f48b01ff6f2cbc72e080067039943de07)

The problem in making decisions is not obvious calculations, but assigning
importance in relative of each other.

------
themodelplumber
I love tools like this. Thanks for sharing it. It's nice to go through a
process like that and feel extra-good about your decision. :-)

It reminds me of a tool I used some time ago, the "Oracle" script at
SimilarMinds.com. One difference is that the Oracle script used forced-choice
based on baked-in global factors, even including how much a decision would
affect your social standing, for example.

~~~
tannerljohnson
Thanks for sharing! I'm glad it's useful :) I originally made it because I
wasn't feeling confident in a direction I was about to take in life. I wrote
it all down in a spreadsheet and actually changed my mind after doing a
similar process!

~~~
themodelplumber
That's super cool. A friend was just asking me "how do you use numbers to
weigh decisions again" and we laughed at the synchronicity when I sent her
your link and she read the title. Thanks again.

------
dotancohen
Nice tool!

It would be nice to be able to go back and fix mistakes. For instance, on the
first pass after entering something to consider I pressed Enter. I didn't even
notice the "important" radio button, so the first choice got "somewhat
important". It was actually super important and there was seemingly no way to
fix it.

~~~
tannerljohnson
Thanks for this feedback! This seems like a great ability to have

~~~
Noumenon72
My need for the back button was that I clicked "that's enough to consider"
when I was done entering things, and immediately realized you wanted me to
click "submit", then "that's enough to consider". So the last choice I entered
didn't get considered.

------
mbil
This is cool. It looks like this is a program for creating and evaluating a
decision matrix:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix).
This got me thinking about an idea for a similar tool, but catered to a
specific domain, one that can be populated with data to help make the decision
-- e.g., where to live, where to go to dinner, what kind of car to buy, etc. A
decision where the options have known important criteria and quantifiable
values, e.g. a decision about where to live has criteria like cost of living,
crime rate, walk score, etc. Essentially, it would be like criteria filters
you commonly see on shopping websites except it would let you rank those
filtering criteria as well.

------
tunesmith
Anyone remember letsimondecide.com? Early 2010's, it did this and was aiming
to be acquired like hunch.com was apparently (I hadn't heard of hunch.com). I
think it never happened and it eventually went inactive.

------
afarviral
I just used it to decide whether practicing guitar or 3d modelling should be
my priority. It made me think very clearly about what matters to me, and work
through the decision

------
emmanueloga_
I just stumbled upon a product that helps solve decision making problems while
looking for info on the "Rete algorithm" [1].

On that note, it is pretty cool that you made a V1 and just released it. If it
was me I would get lost in a bread first search of algorithms and prior art
and whatnot :-p

1: [https://www.sparklinglogic.com/smarts-decision-
manager/](https://www.sparklinglogic.com/smarts-decision-manager/)

~~~
sixdimensional
Rete algorithm - famous in business rules engines, forward chaining, backward
chaining, inference engines - all fun topics in the field of expert systems.
Much of it, however, left behind in the pursuit of more complex machine
learning and AI approaches, as of late.

I did a lot of work/research in this area while working for a fraud detection
company.

You might be interested in an old public domain tool called CLIPS that NASA
released many years ago [1]. It is a lot of fun and amazingly powerful,
albeit, I don’t hear much about it anymore. Still works though!

[1] [http://www.clipsrules.net/](http://www.clipsrules.net/)

------
jolmg
I don't know why, but I was expecting this to just take a list of choices and
decide on one randomly, with the idea that sometimes making a choice is more
important than what choice is made. I know there are times where I've gotten
stuck on something because I couldn't make my mind up on retrospectively,
relatively unimportant decisions.

Thanks for sharing.

------
karmakaze
I would much rather have the each question ask me to rate all my options on
one aspect. I had to keep scrolling up and down to see what I said for other
things to see where my answer fit in with what I said about that aspect for
other options.

Btw, it tells me I should be using F#

------
orangefarm
Cool prototype !

I've been pondering the idea if software can help us to make decisions in the
way you have shown here for a while. If you (or anyone else) would like to
have an exchange about it, my email is in my profile.

------
TekMol
Since there is nothing in the "about" page, I looked at your HN profile. But
it only carries a link to LinkedIn which only shows me a login page.

A link to a personal website or Twitter profile would be nice.

------
ct520
I do this mentally when organizing my day. I usually only take one thing into
consideration though. Such a simple app with great value to me personally.
Thanks for sharing.

------
baliex
I put in “where should I run?” just to get past that first stage to see what
would happen next and ended up going through the whole process. Really simple,
kinda fun, thanks!

------
rubidium
Yet another web app that’s easier to do in excel.

~~~
slig
Except now it's already done, can run on any computer with or without an
Office license, can be potentially used by orders of magnitude more people
than a .XLS file, etc.

------
tekknolagi
I thought it would be a site where you ask a question and then before you
submit you have to answer someone else's. Crowd choice.

------
amelius
I was expecting crowdsourcing, or deep learning.

------
DeathArrow
That app helped me waste 2 minutes of my life.

~~~
qnsi
Pls help me decide if I should waste my 2 minutes on this app

------
jamespetercook
Thanks for helping me decide what to do today on my birthday, during lockdown.
Board games!

------
ddevault
I use an IRC bot - you just say ".choose A B C" and it prints out a random
choice.

------
ethanwillis
Explain to me how something like this ends up so highly upvoted.

~~~
raister
Have you read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman? They gave him a
Nobel for tackling decision problems. I guess that's one important problem to
humanity in general.

------
tylerjwilk00
I built a popular tool in the same niche [1]. I think your over complicating
it. I got decision fatigue just trying to test it.

[1] [https://easydecisionmaker.com/](https://easydecisionmaker.com/)

~~~
conradfr
It's just random right?

Funny I did basically the same app as everyone for the ever common problem of
deciding where to go to lunch at work.

[https://ploufplouf.funkybits.fr](https://ploufplouf.funkybits.fr)

It was a long time ago to try AngularJS (the new hotness of 2012), Less, and
eventually Redis.

------
gherkinnn
That’s cool!

Simple look with standard form elements works well.

------
known
I tried "Should I wear mask or not?"

------
jftuga
My Palo Alto firewall reports:

Web Page Blocked

Access to the web page you were trying to visit has been blocked in accordance
with company policy. Please contact your system administrator if you believe
this is in error.

URL: helpmedecideplease.com/

Category: gambling

