Task 1: Making an individual decision

You learn about the distinction between traditional decision-making methods and the capabilities of Decision Designer, which requires manual ranking and decision logic crafting.

Decision-making traditionally involves choosing between specific alternatives. Consider a customer who wants to buy a camera that outperforms smartphone photography. The market offers various camera systems with different form factors and characteristics, with mirror-less systems dominating the modern landscape.

Mirror-less camera systems serve photographers at all skill levels: beginners, advanced users, and professionals. A critical distinction among these systems is the sensor format:

  • Micro Four Thirds
  • APS-C
  • Full-frame

The challenge lies in identifying which alternative best suits the customer's needs. Customers often consult advisors to evaluate and compare alternatives across multiple criteria. For camera sensor formats, key differentiators include:

  • Crop factor
  • Camera size
  • Low-light performance

Sophisticated decision-aiding methods can assess and aggregate customer preferences consistently, ultimately producing a ranking of alternatives. For example, a customer might rank their preferences as: full-frame > APS-C > Micro Four Thirds.

In Decision Designer, you can introduce a decision node requiring selection among the three sensor format alternatives. However, it lacks:

  • Direct means to evaluate alternatives and determine rankings.
  • Built-in mechanisms to automatically select the best option based on arbitrary rankings.

The ranking helps you craft the decision logic manually, as demonstrated in the next task. This foundational step clarifies the distinction between traditional decision-making approaches and the decision-making capabilities that are supported by Decision Designer.

Exercise: Ranking sensor formats

Choose your personal ranking of the three sensor formats:

  1. Full-frame format
  2. APS-C format
  3. Micro Four Thirds format

Your ranking will determine the decisions in the next task.

Limitations

This approach suits individual decisions where all alternatives remain available in every case. The next task examines scenarios where available alternatives depend on the specific case context.