Decision Manager - Features of Decision Manager

Want to know more about specific features of Decision Manager?

When deciding on a holiday house, a car to buy, a wedding venue or a nice restaurant etc, you often need to show some suggestions to your friends and get their feedback or vote.

With Decision Manager, you can say goodbye to confusing searches, sending emails with cut/pasted URLs and messy responses that you have to analyse.

Decision Manager does this all for you! Check out Decision Manager's features (click on a feature name to read more about it)

You start a project when you want to research a decision on the internet
Decision Manager offers you a set of project templates, with popular decision-making criteria, eg. price, location, number of bedrooms
You just enter the title, description and criteria that are important to you

You can add friends to your project so that they can view and give feedback on your findings
Friends can be added when you start your project, or at any stage from your project page
You can add their email addresses manually, use your Decision Manager Address book, or import them from Gmail, Yahoo or MSN.
You can arrange it so your friends are automatically emailed when your project is updated, or when you are ready to share your findings.

This is the key to Decision Manager! Once you find something you like (e.g. a holiday house) you click on the 'Skim this!' button/bookmark. It will...

Automatically grab the title, description and image of the page
Let you change any of the information it's skimmed
Let you enter in the values for your decision-making criteria
Send all this information straight to your project page and display it in a clear format, which is called a 'option'.

This is like your personal Decision Manager homepage.
It lists all your decision-making projects
It shows projects your friends have shared with you
We suggest some public projects you may like to browse

When you skim something, it's added to one of your project pages
A project page contains everything you need to help make a decision
It shows all your options for that project
Lets you sort and filter all your options by any of the decision-making criteria
Let's you decide what type of feedback you want from your friends:
- Ranking - assign a rank or priority, ie. 1st, 2nd, 3rd...
- Rating - give a rating out of five stars
- Polling - give the thumbs up or thumbs down
- Comments - write opinion on each option

If your friend wants your feedback on a decision, you could be added as a friend on their project
Decision Manager will automatically email you an invitation to their project page
It will be listed on your 'My projects' page
You can sort and filter your friend's findings
You can add extra options to their project page
You can give feedback on each option in the way they want you to

You can also add options to your friend's project, which is great if many of you are involved in researching a decision.

Decision Manager compiles the results from everyone's feedback and represents results graphically:

Rankings are represented by a horse race: the winning horse has the highest average rank
Ratings are represented by stars: the larger the star the higher the average rating
Polls are represented by hands: the larger hands have the most thumbs-up votes
Comments for all options are listed for browsing

Once you have made a decision, Decision Manager helps you act on it with a set of organisational tools:

You can plot the location of your decision on a Google map
Start a checklist where you can assign tasks or make lists etc
Use a notepad to publish information about your decision e.g. bank details
Chat in real-time to your friends using a Meebo instant messaging window (go to www.meebo.com for more details)

Invite your friends to use Decision Manager, or to view one of your projects
See the status of the invitations you have sent to friends