The Effectiveness of Decisional Guidance: An Empirical Evaluation

Abstract

Decisional guidance is defined as how a decision support system (DSS) influences its users as they structure and execute the decision-making process. It is assumed that decisional guidance has profound effects on decision making, but these effects are understudied and empirically unproven. This paper describes an empirical, laboratoryexperiment-based evaluation of the effectiveness of deliberate decisional guidance and its four types. We developed and used a comprehensive model consisting of four evaluation criteria: decision quality, user satisfaction, user learning, and decision-making efficiency. On these criteria, we compared decisional guidance versus no guidance, informative versus suggestive decisional guidance, and predefined versus dynamic decisional guidance. We found that deliberate decisional guidance was more effective on all four criteria; suggestive guidance was more effective in improving decision quality and user satisfaction, and informative guidance was more effective in user learning about the problem domain, whereas dynamic guidance was more effective than predefined guidance in improving decision quality and user learning; and both suggestive guidance and dynamic guidance reduced the decision time.

Increasing Personal Value Congruence in Computerized Decision Support Using System Feedback

“…To better deal with these congruency conflicts, personal values could be incorporated into DSS through the use of targeted feedback. Feedback has been explored in great detail in the psychology, management and IS fields [6][7][8]. Feedback incorporating user values in this study serve as decisional guidance as outlined by Silver [9].…”

“…He defined decisional guidance as "how a [decision support system] enlightens or sways its users as they structure and execute their decision-making processes" ( [9], p. 107). Parikh et al [7] tested the effectiveness of decisional guidance, finding significant support for decisional guidance influencing the decision-making process and decision effectiveness. Feedback, in decision-making, is the process by which information on past decision results are returned to the decision maker from the environment to influence future decision strategies [6].…”

A Development-Oriented IS Evaluation Approach: Case Demonstration for DSS

“…Parikh, Fazlollahi and Verma (2001) proposed a similar view that used four evaluation criteria based on decision quality, decision making satisfaction, decision makers' learning and decision makers' efficiency. However, Phillips-Wren, Hahn and Forgionne (2004) commented that these findings should include information about the outcomes in terms of decision process improvement and any gains in the users' ability to handle decision problems.…”

Incommensurability in design science: which comes first—theory or artefact?

“…Decisional guidance is defined as 'how a decision support system enlightens or sways its users' (Silver 1991). Decisional guidance has been operationalised in a number of ways, including manipulating data display formats (Wilson and Zigurs 1999), providing differing types of explanations (Limayem and Desanctis 2000), prompting decision makers to consider causally related information cues (Montazemi et al 1996), providing feedback on decision accuracy (Montazemi et al 1996) and providing information relating to available decision models (Parikh et al 2001).…”

“…Empirically, it is unclear which of these forms of guidance is superior, particularly as existing empirical studies have not explicitly considered support for differing types of decision makers and decision tasks. Montazemi et al (1996) find that informative guidance produces better decision outcomes when a task is complex, but a later study (Parikh et al 2001) does not directly consider task complexity and finds that suggestive guidance produces better decision quality and user satisfaction in less time. It was these mixed findings that theoretically motivated our program of behavioural research that led to the development of DG-In.…”