Personal choice point: Helping users visualize what it means to buy a BMW

How do we know if we can afford a particular purchase? We can find out what the payments might be and check our balances on various accounts, but does this answer the question? What we really need to know is how this purchase would affect our other goals. What do I have to give up to afford this purchase? Personal Choice Point is a financial planning tool that addresses these questions by enabling a user to explore the repercussions of her decisions at the level of her lifestyle goals, not just her accounts. The user is presented with a graphical representation of primary lifestyle goals such as home, car, vacation, education, etc. As the user selects goals and modifies them, it presents the impact on the user's life by graphically depicting the impact of a decision on her other goals. In effect, Personal Choice Point is a planner that helps restrict the user's search for a suitable allocation of resources among goals to the likely set of allocations, from the much larger space of possible ones. The result is a system that changes the focus of the user's task from managing the mechanics of resource allocation to the evaluation and selection of likely ones.