Quantifying Qualitative Decisions

Lynn Boyden, USC Information Technology Services

One of the hardest things that we face every day, in business and in our personal lives, is making good decisions. Which house should you buy? Which of these seventeen enterprise software package enhancements should we prioritize and dedicate resources to? Which platform should we use to develop our app? Which of these UX designers is the best addition to our team? The decisions must account for many different factors, and multiple stakeholders bring differing priorities to the table. These decisions are challenging because they are qualitative in nature.

Lynn has developed an approach that engages the participants in a decision-making process. It helps them prioritize and evaluate the various possibilities, resulting in a quantified outcome. It’s quick to set up and execute, and the participatory nature of the process generates buy-in and acceptance of the outcome. Lynn will walk you through the method and show you a few examples. We’ll discuss some variations based on your setting and the type of decision you’re making, and then Lynn will field questions from the audience.

About the Speaker

Lynn Boyden (@lrb23) trained as a librarian at UCLA and has worked for various agencies, Symantec and Yahoo!. She ran the Los Angeles office of FatDUX, where she numbered UCLA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the University of Illinois, and KBHome among her clients. She is an information architect in ITS at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and has taught user experience design in the Master’s degree program in Information Studies at UCLA since 2001.

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