A little help to make better decisions

For the indecisive among us, help is on the way. A new generation of apps meant to help with day-to-day decision making is here. Assuming you can decide which to use, these apps may help bring some order to your life.

Perhaps the smartest decision-making app I’ve used is ChoiceMap, because it’s both really easy to use and it makes it feel as if your decision has been intelligently considered by the app’s algorithms. ChoiceMap, which is free for iOS, tries to make the process as smooth as possible.

To start, you describe a choice to make or use one of the app’s many templates on diverse topics, like choosing baby names or which phone carrier to use.

Once you have described the decision to be made, and typed in all the outcomes that could result, the app lets you explain all the factors that influence your thinking. If you’re trying to decide where to go for a vacation, for example, cost may be the biggest factor.

Next, you dial through each possible outcome - Las Vegas, Los Angeles or maybe Europe? - and rate it against the influence factors by sliding markers up and down. This interface and the slider positions you can choose help to make the app feel more meaningful than if you merely had to choose among a handful of fixed options.

When you’ve addressed the possible outcomes, the app will tell you which it has calculated to be the best and show you all the results as simple bar graphs. You can share your results in a number of ways, including via email and Twitter. The app is simple and useful for organising thoughts about a particular decision. Despite its simplicity, I still found its menus to be a little bewildering at times.

The Decision Buddy Decision Maker app, also free for Android phones, is similar to ChoiceMap, but with some neat extras, like being able to help with group decision making. This app has a similar text-based interface, but it’s less about grading the different options and more about choosing between outcomes without overthinking.

Like ChoiceMap, Decision Buddy also has templates, or you can enter your own. Once you’ve entered the title of your decision and the criteria that could influence it, you tap your way through options, and the app will tell you which outcome to choose.

It is easy to use, and the real strength of this app is in making difficult group decisions. You can enter in the names of several people, and the app, after being passed around the group, will provide the final decision.

FYI Decision, which is free for iOS, is a great alternative to ChoiceMap and Decision Buddy. The app works in similar ways, using a slider system for rating how much each of the influencing factors should weigh into the decision. But this app’s strength is that it displays the results more visually, with charts that show how your ratings affected the recommended outcome.

If you’re choosing a car to buy, for example, you can see how your concern about price would affect the available models. I love this app’s simplicity, but it’s worth pointing out that it is supported by advertising, and the pop-up ads can be annoying. It costs $3 (Rs 187) to upgrade to remove the ads. The upgrade also allows it to output results as a PDF.

Sometimes, of course, you want an app to make the decision for you without any of your input.That’s where Decide Now, $1 (Rs 62) on iOS, is great. Think of it like a wheel of fortune. You spin the on-screen wheel that’s labelled with different options and go with the one that’s selected by the marker when the wheel finally stops spinning. The app has many wheel options preloaded - like your options for a night on the town - or you can enter them.

Decision Maker by Jonathan Chow is a similar, free Android app, although it’s not as attractive.But remember: The app doesn’t have to live with the consequences of your decision.