🛠️ decidedly so

Decidedly So is an app to help a group make a decision, such as "where are we going for dinner tonight?", or, "which logo do we prefer for our app?". It's similar to many other "quick poll" apps, but, designed to be "fairer", ie. better capture the group members' true preferences.

Most polls are equivalent to plurality based voting - each participant chooses their favourite option, and the option with the most favourites wins. Despite this method's remaining popularity for elections in Canada and the United States, most of the rest of the democratic world has figured out that plurality voting is one of the worst ways to capture the voters' preferences. (Why? I recommend starting with Social Choice Theory and Electoral Systems on Wikipedia).

Small groups deserve better decision-making tools!

Instead of plurality voting, Decidedly works with ranked lists and a method to combine the lists called the Schulze Method.

How it works step-by-step:

• someone ("the poll administrator") creates a poll with options,
  • let's say: "What movie do we want to see?"
  • ex. K-Pop Demon Hunters, Thunderbolts, Weapons, etc.
• they send the generated poll link to the participants
• each participant follows the link, and is given a series of pairwise comparisons of the choices
  • K-Pop Demon Hunters vs. Thunderbolts
  • Thunderbolts vs. Weapons
• ...resulting in an ordered list for the participant (ex. K-Pop Demon Hunters > Thunderbolts > Weapons)
• the poll administrator sees an ordered list based on all the participants' responses
  • the multiple ordered lists are combined into one using the Schulze Method

Also, as a fun bit: Decidedly supports using images or Youtube videos as choices, not just text.

Who's it for?

Decidedly was designed with small groups in mind (4-20): ex. a team deciding where to have their offsite retreat; but, we've also used it for crowdsourced opinion polling: ex. asking thousands of social media followers which logo design they prefer. I have used it 1:1 with my partner, and also solo (just leveraging the pairwise selection process to help me make a choice or develop a ranking).

It's particularly good for "opinion" / "feely" decisions, where there is no "rational" choice - just preferences of the participants.

I've most often used Decidedly as a quick way to get a (non-binding) feeling for the preferences within a group (ie. a vibe-check poll).

Decidedly could be used as an "ultimate decision maker" (ie. formal voting), but as a big "social choice theory" nerd, I want to make clear: formal voting is rarely the right choice for many group decisions. Wikipedia's Group-Decision Making page is a good overview of alternative processes - my go-to is usually consensus-processes or consent-processes.

While we're talking social choice theory, it's worth noting that ranked ballots aren't necessarily the perfect formal voting method. Arrow's Theorem shows that there any system using ranked ballots makes has tradeoffs. Voting alternatives like score voting or quadratic voting (oh hey, I made an app for that too) should be considered. But almost anything is better than plurality voting (yuck!).

Screenshots

Poll creation:

A pairwise question:

Individual ranking result:

Group poll result:

Group poll result - detailed: (showing in how many lists a choice beat another choice)

History

I was a big fan of Doodle when it first came out (and I much preferred its design circa 2008), particularly for scheduling events but also making choices with friends.

When I was in university, I discovered alternative voting systems thanks to the Engineering Society's use of ranked lists and instant-runoff voting for its elections. I eventually wrote their electronic voting system, became the Chief Electoral Officer, and generally went down a rabbit hole of Social Choice Theory.

Thus, I eventually became frustrated with the "clearly inferior" way of polling my friends for what to do on Friday night.

The idea of Decidedly was kicking around in my head for quite a while. In mid-2016, I added a stripped-down version of the app idea to the Lighthouse mid-term project list. But, none of the groups bothered, so I eventually just did it myself.

All together, the app brings together the following "insights":

• pairwise comparisons can be used to develop a ranked list, it is exactly what comparison sorting algorithms do
• some sorting algorithms are more "question efficient"; which one is most efficient? (answer: Merge-Insertion Sort)
• how can ranked lists be combined into one list? (answer: many ways; the Schulze Method]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method) is pretty good because it is a Condorcet Method)

With friends, I've used Decidedly for questions like:

• what tv series to watch next together?
  • (I added Youtube video support just for this; each question was just a trailer for the show)
• what board games to play at the next get together?
• to getting a feel for what aspects of DnD a group prefers (narrative vs. discovery vs. immersion etc.)

At Bloom, we've used Decidedly for:

• deciding which project to focus on
• deciding which tasks to prioritize
• deciding on what kind of swag to order
• deciding on names, logos and domain names for products
  • sometimes even crowdsourcing it (ie. sending the poll out to our users, or on social media)

Fun Facts

For a long time, I was calling this project "pairwise", but when we tried to "make it a thing" at Bloom, we renamed it to "Decidedly So" (a reference to one of the answers from a Magic 8 Ball). We probably chose the name using Decidedly itself.

The domain makes use of a "domain hack"; the .so in the name is the TLD for Somalia.

Plans

It's mostly complete. There are likely some UX paper-cuts to polish. If anything, just marketing it better.