What if …..? Designing tools to help the public make difficult decisions

Information overload results from having plenty of data but not enough time to organize it so that it assists decision making. This paper argues that although digital tools can help people make decisions, their development could benefit from an appreciation of how people’s behavior changes as the display features of the tools change. Therefore advantages could come from greater collaboration between designers and researchers who explore the psychological processes that enable decision making (processes such as search, understanding, inference and memory). Evidence is provided of individual differences in the way decision aids are used, and the value of multimodality information to accommodate diverse audience needs.