Cloverpop offers web site to help people make big decisions

Infographics company Cloverpop, Inc., has put online a website designed to help people make big decisions. Most people have long grown used to running to the Internet for answers to simple questions, e.g. how long do you cook a meatloaf, and some have used chat rooms to get advice on some of the bigger stuff, such as should they dump a bad boyfriend, but until now, there hasn't really been a website that boasts that it can offer real advice on big decisions, such as should you buy a house, get married, etc. With its new site, Cloverpop appears to be attempting to do just that.

At first mention, it's likely most would expect such a site to offer crowd sourced answers. But that option would have to overcome two serious problems—the person asking would have to wait and come back later for answers, and those asked for advice likely wouldn't be able to offer good advice because they wouldn't be close enough to it. To get around such problems, the team at Cloverpop designed the site to instead ask the person looking for an answer a series of questions designed to elicit both real world feelings about answer options, repercussions regarding each choice and how the person asking the questions might feel about possible outcomes for each of the possibilities.

As an example, if a person asks the system if they should buy a house, the system will ask them about other options such as renting, renting to own, etc. It will also ask how they feel about each of the options and how they think they'd feel about each choice later on, after time has passed. After the series of questions have been asked and answered, the system returns with a "yes" or "no" to the original question—along with three scores: a confidence meter (how strongly the site thinks it's right), a gut meter (how strongly the site thinks you should trust your gut) and a trade-off meter (how strongly conflicted the site thinks you are).

In many ways, the site represents a conversation a person might have with a friend, in others, a simple pros and cons chart. In the end, what it really appears to do, of course is help a person outline their options, think clearly about each one and then urges them to give some thought to how each might pan out—and in many cases reaffirms an answer they were leaning towards all along.

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