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About this lesson

View your alternative rankings, compare alternatives to each other in more detail, and understand why your alternatives scored the way they did.

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Quick reference

Ranked Alternatives

See a list of your ranked alternatives and their scores, and compare alternatives to each other in more detail.

When to use

Use this when you want to view the rankings of all your alternatives, and understand why they scored the way they did.

Instructions

List of ranked alternatives

  • Click on "ranked alternatives" in the menu on the left to access this page.
  • Export your list of ranked alternatives to excel by clicking the "export" button at the top
  • If you change the criteria or category of an alternative, click on "update" at the top to refresh this list and update the alternative rankings based on your new changes

Comparing ranked alternatives

  • On the ranked alternatives page, select whichever alternatives you wish to compare, and click the "compare" button above the table.
  • Radar chart
    • Use this to see how each alternative performs on each criterion
    • Select "show hypothetically best possible alternative" to compare your best possible alternative to the other alternatives on the chart
    • Click on any alternative below the chart to remove it from the display
  • Disaggregated scores
    • Shows you the total scores of the alternatives you're comparing and breaks down this score into how the alternatives performed on each criterion.
    • This makes it easier to compare the performance on each criterion and the overall scores with each other.
  • Performance on individual attributes 
    • Use this to easily compare alternative performances on individual criteria to each other
    • This chart focuses more on individual criteria than the radar chart or disaggregated score
    • Also lists your costs and other considerations, but these are better analyzed on the alternative selection page.
  • Tornado chart
    • Use this to see how the alternatives you’re comparing would score differently if the rating on a given criterion were higher or lower by one level
    • Useful for seeing the impact of having miscategorized an alternative, or to see what criterion you should focus on to create the largest improvement in an alternative's score 
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  • 00:05 Now let's look at the ranked alternatives.
  • 00:08 Here we see a list of our alternatives and their criteria with the rank of each
  • 00:13 alternative, their total score based on the trade-offs we made.
  • 00:19 And the amount each criterion contributed to the score of each alternative.
  • 00:25 Let's take a closer look at these ranked alternatives.
  • 00:30 We can export our list of ranked alternatives as
  • 00:34 an Excel file by clicking on Export up here.
  • 00:38 And in the menu on the right we also have a few display options that we can
  • 00:42 play around with.
  • 00:43 So, we can choose not to display the criteria, or
  • 00:47 we can choose to display or not to display costs and other considerations.
  • 00:55 We want to compare some of our alternatives to each other in more detail.
  • 01:01 So we select the alternatives that we want to compare and click Compare.
  • 01:10 First, we have a radar chart that shows how each of the alternatives that we're
  • 01:15 comparing perform in each of our criteria.
  • 01:19 If our ideal city existed that has a perfect score in each of our criteria,
  • 01:24 how would these existing alternatives compare?
  • 01:29 We can find out by ticking the box on the top left above the chart.
  • 01:35 Then the shaded area is what our best possible alternative would look like.
  • 01:40 And that shows us that actually San Francisco is very close to being our
  • 01:45 ideal city to live in.
  • 01:47 Which becomes even more clear when we hide the other alternatives from the chart.
  • 01:54 We can do this by clicking on the other alternatives in the legend
  • 01:58 below the chart.
  • 02:04 The disaggregated scores show us the total scores of
  • 02:07 the alternatives we are comparing.
  • 02:09 And break down this score into how the alternatives performed on each criterion.
  • 02:16 This makes it easier to compare the performance on each criterion and
  • 02:20 the overall scores with each other.
  • 02:23 So we see that weather is the main advantage that San Francisco and
  • 02:27 Cartagena have over New York City, which gives them a higher total score.
  • 02:34 Public transport on the other hand,
  • 02:36 is where San Francisco and New York City outperformed Cartagena.
  • 02:41 We want to compare more closely the performance of these three alternatives
  • 02:46 under weather and public transport criteria,
  • 02:49 since that is where they differ from each other.
  • 02:52 This chart makes it easier to compare individual criteria to each other.
  • 02:58 Again, we see that Cartagena has the worst public transport system out of these
  • 03:03 three alternatives, while New York has the best public transport system.
  • 03:10 But because our trade-offs established that weather is more important to us
  • 03:15 than public transport, the fact that Cartagena has great weather makes
  • 03:20 a bigger difference than New York's great public transport system,
  • 03:24 which gives Cartagena a higher overall score, as we see above.
  • 03:30 So how much better would New York perform if its weather was one level higher?
  • 03:36 We can see this information by looking at the tornado chart down here.
  • 03:42 This chart shows us how the alternatives we're comparing would score differently
  • 03:47 if their weighting on a given criterion were higher or lower by one level.
  • 03:53 So we see that, actually,
  • 03:55 New York would score 25 points higher if only it had better weather.
  • 04:00 And then it would have a perfect score, making it the ideal alternative.
  • 04:07 From this chart we can also see the potential effect of having miscategorized
  • 04:11 something.
  • 04:13 So actually,
  • 04:14 I wasn't sure how good exactly Cartagena's public transport system is.
  • 04:19 And we see that moving up by one level would increase its score by 7.1%,
  • 04:24 which should actually give it the same score as San Francisco.
  • 04:30 On the other hand,
  • 04:31 if it turns out that Cartagena actually has a bad public transport system,
  • 04:36 and I didn't know this, then its score would decrease by 14.3 points.
  • 04:42 And then New York city would actually rank higher than Cartagena.
  • 04:47 This chart can also be useful for planning purposes, because it shows you what
  • 04:52 criteria you can focus on to create the greatest improvement in an alternative.
  • 04:57 Of course, that doesn't apply to us here, because it's not like I can change
  • 05:02 Cartagena's public transport system, or control New York City's weather.
  • 05:08 Of course, your costs and other considerations are also very important
  • 05:12 when trying to find the best alternative.
  • 05:15 These are briefly listed here, but you can analyze them much more effectively
  • 05:20 using a value for money chart, which we will go over in the next video.
  • 05:25 And who knows, those might actually make your highest ranked alternative not so
  • 05:30 ideal as it seems.

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