my roles:  User Research, Interaction Design

What's a business decision?  Whenever a company has a choice, such as an airline choosing to upgrade your seat, it's usually determined by a set of business rules.  Does the flyer have platinum status?  Did the flyer pay full price for their original ticket?

Blueworks Live is a collaborative Web tool for discovering and documenting business processes.  With my designs, analysts can now documenting even more, business decisions.  

Design challenge: Help users draw their business decisions in a flow that feels natural to how they think about them.



First, I added a place for managing the new Decision documents.


Simply name it and place it into a collaboration space and you're ready to document the new Decision.


Business decisions are often built from the conclusions of other decisions.  I observed that people think about the final decision first.  For example, the airline will upgrade a flyer's seat when the customer has a vip status and paid full price for their ticket.  Then people break down those considerations into decisions that affect it.  For example, what is the customers status: platinum, gold, or silver?  As a result, I designed a top-down way of building Decisions.

Here is how I designed the canvas interaction for building a decision:


I built in smarts too.  For example, any output from a sub-decision, like the price paid ...


... becomes a consideration to its parent decision, helping the user document what drives the decision.