Hunch, a website to help you make decisions on...anything
If you have a big decision to make, whether it's who you should vote for or whether you should ditch your facial hair, there are many tried and true ways of coming to an answer. My favorites include reading the opinions of "experts" who I trust, informally polling my friends, and asking my mom. My mom and my friends are great, but may not always be the best sources of advice. How to get a broader opinion to inform my decision making?
Enter Hunch, an internet platform that aims to help you improve your decision making by getting to know you generally ("do you believe that alien abductions are real?") and by asking you related questions to to your main question of choice. The site creates a decision tree, informed by the results of all of its users, to use the "wisdom of crowds" to give you an informed and personalized recommendation.
From founder Caterina Fake (of Flickr fame):
Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result -- a Hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn't give other people...On Hunch, people can create a Topic (as we call it) that acts like a human expert, getting to a decision by asking relevant follow up questions and weighing trade offs. We think that it can ultimately save people lots of strenuous cognitive labor: not everyone who buys a computer needs to become a computer expert.
The site is currently open to those who request an invitation, and as someone who is consistenty struggling to be more decisive, I am glad to have tried it. The first question that I explored, "which credit card should I own?", led me to an answer by asking seven related questions--are you willing to pay an annual fee? do you want your rewards to be in travel, cash back, or points? what is your bank preference, if any? what is your credit score? etc.." It took me about 30 seconds to answer these questions and then the site produced a #1 recommendation: the Chase Freedom Card. That IS my credit card of choice! The decision that took me hours of online research, informal polling of my friends, time sitting around making sure this was the right card for me was answered on Hunch in 30 seconds. Wow.
This success made me excited to delve into my source of eternal pondering: "what city should I live in?" This time I answered only four questions related to the size of the city I would prefer, the amount of cold weather that I can stand, my regional preference, and whether I would mind living in a high cost area. I gave pretty open answers to all and my #1 result was....Philadelphia. #2 was Portland, Oregon. #3 was Wilmington. Why these three? Mystery.
The site, like most recommendation platforms, will only get stronger as the user base expands. Ms. Fake announced recently on her blog that users have answered 4.3 million questions since the site was launched (users could begin requesting invitations to use the site as of March 27). The recommendation algorithm, developed by MIT machine learning experts, is pretty powerful. Its strength also comes from offering cross-domain recommendations. I rely heavily on Amazon recommendations for books and iTunes recommendations for music, and I would love to see my preferences in those different spheres interact. For now, the site is pretty bare bones and only 500 topics are offered. I'll still be calling up my mom for those big decisions in the short term, but maybe Hunch will eventually supplant her wisdom.
Hunch, Wisdom of Crowds 
Reader Comments (2)
This is very interesting! As someone who is often disabled by indecision I am very excited to hear about this site. One question I have is whether Hunch asks any questions about your personal hunches or intuitions? Although it can be claimed that the best decision making is purely rational, it rarely is. Are there any questions that attempt to gauge the user's comfort level or dig behind emotional reasons for making certain decisions? And if not, is this a strength or weakness of this decision-making tool? Thank you for informing us about it though and I am now going to go sign on!
@anonymous. That's an interesting point. You are referring to the arguments of Malcolm Gladwell and others that instincts can sometimes lead to as good/better judgments than thoughtful deliberations. I don't believe that Hunch currently asks you about your own hunches, but by "getting to know you" generally, it is in a sense, aiming to mimick your own instinctual process.