Public Decisions Are Now Free, and Unlock Premium Features

Until now, decisionpoint.io had one way to get access to premium features: a subscription. From today, users on the free can make decisions public, and those public decisions will have access to sensitivity analysis, consistency fixing, and Group AHP in workshop mode.

Why Change This?

When Public Decisions launched back in February, the idea was that subscribers could share their work with anyone. Since then, two things have become clear from talking to users.

The first is that sensitivity analysis is the feature people miss most. One experienced AHP practitioner described it to me as what makes the difference between AHP software and a spreadsheet. Locking it behind a subscription meant that most of our users never saw the benefit of it.

The second is that a public decision is good for decisionpoint.io. Every public decision is a worked example that anyone can open, drill into, and learn from, in the same way as the case studies. If you are willing to put your decision out in the open, then it seems fair to give something back.

How It Works

Open a decision's settings, find the Sharing section, and click Make Public. Anyone with the link (and search engines) can then view the decision: the goal, criteria, alternatives, judgments and results. In return, the following features are enabled for that decision:

• Sensitivity analysis: explore how far each criterion's weight can move before the ranking changes.
• Automated consistency fixing: the guided dialog that finds the judgments that conflict most and suggests the smallest change to resolve them.
• Workshop mode: invite collaborators, turn on Group AHP, and combine everyone's judgments by geometric mean.

You can make a decision private again at any time. Nothing is deleted when you do, but the features above switch off for that decision until it is public again or you subscribe. If Group AHP was on, it is turned off as well; your collaborators' judgments are kept, and the aggregation comes straight back if you re-enable it.

Subscribers are unaffected. A subscription still enables every feature on every decision, public or private.

Survey Mode Is the Exception

Survey mode remains a subscriber feature, and it cannot be unlocked by making a decision public. The reason is a practical one. Survey respondents are meant to be blind: they see the comparisons, and nothing else. A public decision would let any respondent open the results page before answering, which defeats the purpose. For the same reason, the app now stops you from making a decision public while its survey is open, and from opening a survey on a public decision.

If you are a researcher or an educator and a subscription is a stretch, drop me an email. I am happy to make academic arrangements.

Try It Out

The change is live now in the app. If you have a decision you would be happy to share, make it public and take sensitivity analysis for a spin. As always, I'm very happy to receive feedback, just use the contact form or send me an email at philip.healy@decisionpoint.io.

— Philip