Creating Effective Decision Aids for Complex Tasks  

Engineering design tasks require designers to continually compare, weigh, and choose among many complex alternatives. The quality of these selection decisions directly impacts the quality, cost, and safety of the final product. Because of the high degree of uncertainty in predicting the performance of alternatives while they are still just sketches on the drawing board, and the high cost of poor choices, mathematical decision methods incorporating uncertainty have long held much appeal for product designers, at least from a theoretical standpoint.

Clarke Hayes, Caroline and Farnaz Akhavi. Journal of Usability Studies (2008). Articles>Usability>Knowledge Management>EPSS