When presented with many pieces of information it's not always obvious where to start. Getting messy things in order is a useful aid to decision making.
- Write all your ideas on individual sticky notes
- Reduce the number of notes by rejecting low priority items and combining notes that deal with similar things
- Compare pairs of notes in turn and put the most important one higher up the list
- Use the same criteria in each comparison to find the most important notes in each pair
- When no more swaps can be made the list will be in order of importance
- For example, if you wanted to determine the most important factors in choosing a pushchair you could take all the potential considerations from your research (or brainstorm them) and then Compare Notes to determine the most important considerations.
- This method also works for ranking things other than by importance, for instance in order of speed, cost, quality or desirability.
You could...
...also use this method with users to get them to put their considerations in order of importance, for example, 'What are the most important considerations connected with buying a new home?