Examples

Suppose you’re leading a design team and you want to decide which design tool you want to use as a team. This can be a web page design at the ICT lecture or this can be the process of a new product. Examples can be more up to creativity. You’ve done some research and you narrowed down your options to three: Sketch, Figma and Framer. Let’s put them in your decision matrix table.

Now let’s look at the factors you need to consider. You have a set budget for tools so the cost will be the first factor. After discussing with your team, you agree that the prototyping and collaboration capabilities of a tool are most important for them. Now you have the factors that will influence the decision.

It’s time to score each option on every factor. Let’s use a scale of 1 to 5 (where 1 is the worst, 5 is the best), but you can use any scale you like.

Cost – You find out that Figma and Framer both cost £12/editor/month, while Sketch is a little cheaper at 9 euros. You’ll score them 3 and 4 respectively.

Prototyping – Framer comes out as the most powerful in prototyping. Figma and Sketch are somewhat similar, but Figma can do a little more. Framer gets a 5, Figma a 3 and Sketch a 2.

Collaboration – You let your team evaluate this one. They agree that Figma is the best for collaboration, scoring it with 5. Sketch and Framer both get a 3.

Let’s see how these look like in your decision matrix:

At this point, the decision might be a little clearer, but all factors aren’t equally important. You need to add weight to them. Since your budget is set, the cost factor is the most important, making it a 5. Your team says that prototyping is a little more important for them than collaboration features. You weight the factors accordingly:

The next step is multiplying the scores with the weight of each factor. Score on each factor then adds up to a final score for every option:

And there you have it. You have a score for each option based on the factors that are important for you. In this case, Framer comes out as the winner.

Decision matrix is a very useful tool for situations like this. When there are multiple factors to consider, this tools removes the uncertainty and subjectivity from your decision-making. It allows you to clearly figure out which decision is the most reasonable to make.