Decisions and Technology

Ultimately its about the how technological results translate into decisions.  So that makes this interesting.   Does tech enhance decisions, and how can you make it do that?  The influence of user interface?    Organizations, like a company or even an Army are ways that have been established with ways to influence decisions internally and externally.

Does technology really enhance our decision-making ability?     By ARL Public Affairs

ADELPHI, Md. -- An Army scientist recently won a best paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery's 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization for discovering that most people cannot distinguish between liking a user interface and making good choices.

Dr. James Schaffer, U.S. Army Research Laboratory scientist stationed at ARL West, and his collaborators at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Drs. John O'Donovan and Tobias Höllerer, received the best paper award at the conference held in July at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

So, does technology really enhance our decision-making ability?

The paper, "Separating User Experience from Choice Satisfaction," addresses this question and furthers the theory that underpins the evaluation of recommender systems, which are designed to help users make good choices.

Simply put, recommender systems are artificially intelligent algorithms that use big data to suggest additional products to consumers based off of things such as past purchases, demographic information or search history, for example. Think of the "people you may know" feature that exists on many of today's social media platforms.

In recommender systems, it has been assumed that users form very complex mental models of user interfaces.

This is reflected in current user experience measurements, which elicit subjective responses on a wide range of system features.  .... "