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Lesson 8: Visualize the results

After you prioritize elements, you can visualize results in various graphical formats in order to support your decisions. In the visuals, priorities are represented as bars, bubbles, and lines.
In this lesson, you visualize your prioritization results to analyze which car is the best. You also change the criteria weights to learn how they affect your results.
  1. To visualize results, click Visualize > All Cars.
  2. On the toolbar, click the Bar chart icon (Bar chart icon) to view the results in a bar chart.
    Bar chart

    The bar chart shows one criterion. The chart indicates that Car C is better looking than Car F. The elements that rank the highest for a criterion are indicated by green check boxes. The scale shows relative design appeal in percentages. The lengths of all bars sum to 100%.

    You can choose from several visualizations; no guidelines exist about which visualization techniques to use in different situations. For the data in this tutorial, you might also use the stacked bar chart.

  3. Click the Stacked bar chart icon (Stacked bar chart icon).
    Stacked bar chart
    In the stacked bar chart, you can see multiple criteria simultaneously. As the previous image shows, when you consider both cost and design, the relative rank is different. When both criteria are considered, the bar at the top represents the element that ranks the highest according to the criteria. The bar at the bottom of the chart represents the element that ranks the lowest according to the criteria.

    For car elements, you might have many more criteria, such as versatility, environmental friendliness, safety, and build quality. Or, you might have more stakeholders to represent. All these criteria can be shown at the same time in the stacked bar chart.

  4. Clear some of the check boxes and see how the value indicators in the upper right corner change. As you select and clear the check boxes, the value indicators reflect that you do not get all of the relative value (design) and the relative cost. In this example, the value indicators are less useful than they might be in other situations. For example, if you were considering a set of features to implement in a software product, you might use the indicators to see what features to consider in order to get 60% of the value for 30% of the cost.
  5. Consider what happens if the Price criterion is more important than the Design criterion. In the right frame, right-click and select Criteria Scenarios.
    Menu options for criteria
    The Criteria Scenarios window opens, in which you can explore different scenarios. For example, if the cost is twice as important as design, which car would be the best?
  6. In the Criteria Scenarios window, move the Price slider until the value is 80%.
    Criteria Scenarios window
    The black triangles (black triangle indicators) indicate the rank of the elements. The closer the triangles are to the right, the higher an element is ranked for a criterion.
  7. To refresh the order of the elements in the stacked bar chart based on the changed criteria scenario, minimize the Criteria Scenarios window, and click the Stacked bar chart icon Stacked bar chart
    Updated stacked bar chart based on updated criteria

    If price is more important than design, Car F is indicated as the best because its black triangles are closest to the right. The black triangles indicate that Car D provides the least design for the price.

    If you close the Criteria Scenarios window, the relative weight of the criteria that you modified is fixed.

    In other situations, you might consider other issues, for example:
    • If I reduce the budget, how would my planning be affected?
    • How robust is my risk analysis?
    You can experiment with these criteria to see the effects of such scenarios.
You can now generate a report of the prioritization results.

Lesson checkpoint

In this lesson, you learned to complete the following tasks:
  • Viewing the prioritization results in different display modes
  • Analyzing the results
  • Changing the criteria scenario and visualizing the results
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