# How it Works

## How the Evaluation works

The Evaluation is comprised of configurable features and requirements tables, scores (and rankings) for products, and a collaborative text editor experience to help you whittle down requirements and features, and various types of blocks to show the data.

### Product Scores

All products are rated on all Requirements, Dimensions, and Features.

{% hint style="info" %}
Features are the components that make up Requirements and Dimensions. For example, a Requirement like "Must integrate with our current stack" could include Okta integration and PagerDuty integration as features, and any number of individual Features can map one-to-many to Dimensions.
{% endhint %}

Requirements and Features have 4 possible priority settings:

1. <mark style="background-color:red;">Critical</mark>
2. <mark style="background-color:yellow;">Important</mark>
3. <mark style="background-color:purple;">Nice To Have</mark>
4. <mark style="background-color:blue;">Don't Care</mark>

<figure><img src="https://2292763076-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-MQkUmzRViVxDERN9vKk%2Fuploads%2FHsSy9XIbn3PvFDqV0Py8%2FScreenshot%202023-02-26%20at%2010.11.06%20AM.png?alt=media&#x26;token=84db6e57-c6f7-45fe-af6a-cc0c4e498c97" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

Products can have the following ratings for Requirements and Features:

1. <mark style="background-color:purple;">Great</mark>
2. <mark style="background-color:green;">Good</mark>
3. <mark style="background-color:yellow;">OK</mark>
4. <mark style="background-color:red;">Poor</mark>
5. <mark style="background-color:blue;">N/A</mark>

The weights assigned to Dimensions (e.g., Integration) also impact the overall product scores.

<figure><img src="https://2292763076-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-MQkUmzRViVxDERN9vKk%2Fuploads%2FtSrtl7qrn5bg6MictsaV%2FScreenshot%202023-02-26%20at%2010.18.05%20AM.png?alt=media&#x26;token=a4b64810-0f5d-457a-8ca5-180626bebb34" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

### Product Ranking

The product ranking is a simple order of the products based on their score plus using <mark style="background-color:red;">Critical</mark>-rated features as a threshold function. You may get a product ranked higher despite having a lower score due to this.

<figure><img src="https://2292763076-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-MQkUmzRViVxDERN9vKk%2Fuploads%2Fr1KEEkYvv3okprbCSZnX%2FScreenshot%202023-02-26%20at%2010.12.45%20AM.png?alt=media&#x26;token=cd5322e4-8c03-4ae9-b8ba-5b9a40e45f1d" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

### Impact

Impact tables and charts are calculated by looking at the standard deviation. You may have 5 features that are <mark style="background-color:red;">Critical</mark> but have every product rated the same, whereas 5 features that are <mark style="background-color:purple;">Nice To Have</mark> could  show a lot of variance between products, in which case the <mark style="background-color:purple;">Nice To Have</mark>'s have more Impact.

<figure><img src="https://2292763076-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-MQkUmzRViVxDERN9vKk%2Fuploads%2Fk1bNCvMJztbPOUnfNLE2%2FScreenshot%202023-02-26%20at%2010.17.47%20AM.png?alt=media&#x26;token=eacb4fa8-df5f-4c9f-9864-bfaf9d992ff5" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>