Here is a summary of how you use V•I•S•A. More detail is given in the continuously displayed help messages and the online help .

1) Build a "Value Tree" - the Criteria that are important to you, in a structure that recognises how the Criteria interrelate. Here is an example for someone trying to decide what car to buy:

In V•I•S•A you just sketch out this tree on the screen and drag the criteria around when people in your group think the structure should be different.  It's very interactive.

2) List out the alternatives - Which cars might you buy?

3) Score the cars on the criteria at the bottom level in the tree (in this case criteria like Acceleration, Capital Cost etc. Don't worry about getting them all correct if you don't know some information - estimates if you have to - you will see why later.

To keep this example simple we used 100 = perfect, 0 = bad (but you would normally use actual dollars for cost criteria)

4) Drag the weight bars to reflect the importance of each of the bottom level criteria. Make estimates like with scores. Anyway, weights are much more subjective.

5) Now open up some charts and see what this means:

And start exploring the sensitivity of the outcome to the things you are not sure about. (This is why estimates were OK earlier). Drag some bars around where you are not sure of a score or weight - are there some alternatives that will never be best? (Then use the "hide" feature to remove them from the decision). So you find there are a couple of scores that look quite important but you are not sure of them. Then put some more time into researching just these. Soon you will find you know the right decision to take.

Making this decision with colleagues? Then use multi-user V•I•S•A and work on the web.