The Wonders of a Decision Matrix-Espinosa

This past week Backwards In High Heels has solidified designs and drawn out concept sketches of each of our individual ideas. We were given the opportunity to come together and present, discuss and give thorough explanations of each idea of our ideal heel. These high heel shoe designs were each greatly influenced by products we had recently encountered and the past research we had conducted. In Amelia’s blog she revealed to the world that Backwards In High Heels will be tackling the challenge of shoe insoles rather than the entire high heel seeing as how that task would be quite daunting and was a bit too ambitious. These insoles, however, would be built into shoes rather than sold separately. Our ideas that we presented to each other were equally similar as they were different and we would like to share a very useful tool that you can use for practically any difficult decision you face in life.

A decision matrix is a table that is used to evaluate various options with one common end goal¹. The amount of columns depends on how many choices you have and the amount of rows is dependent on how many properties are being judged and analyzed. Some properties that you could possibly list out in the rows include cost, adjustability, time required, difficulty of solving, or value to customer. Each of these properties that will be analyzed are ranked on importance. The next step to completing a decision matrix is to evaluate each option and ranking them from least effective (higher number) to most effective (lower number). Each row should consist of all numbers in-between one to the total amount of alternatives you are ranking. Now comes a little bit of math. Once you have completed your ranking you multiply the importance ranking by the effectiveness ranking and find the sum of these products within each column. The best product will be revealed by attaining the lowest total. There are different ways to set up a decision matrix, but they all help reveal the smarter choices².

Example of a decision matrix.

Found at Design Refinement Page

Backwards In High Heels had four amazing concepts and one reference high heel that we ranked. Our criteria we chose included various customer needs. Our most important customer need (decided based off of customer interviews) was short term comfort, while our least important customer need was aesthetics, which we saw as more of a want factor than a need. Our end result left my design as the overall “best” with the smallest total of 29. This shoe insole included three separated parts of various materials that would attend specifically to each part of the foot. Now that our team has our final design we can begin figuring out even further details.