Yesterday, I forgot to mention a very important aspect (HINTS):
UR users may have done analysis/synthesis tasks with so-called "flowcharters"; they are either expensive (e.g. MS doesn't include Visio in their "Office" anymore) or (or even "and") quite bad, functionally, since most of them slow down (!) your thinking process, since creating the "right" symbol ("shape") in any such situation isn't as fast as you'd wish; you might download VUE though (free) in case, which visually at least is very pleasing, and with lots of (immediately available) color shades (see above for "degrees (sic!) of (possible) discarding" and similar); as for its symbol Notes (i.e. the very important "developments" texts which inferior programs like "Scapple" continue to lack), they can be correctly exported / re-imported (into UR e.g.) from its XML output (and then just a minimum of regex) whilst pdf output is highly problematic, as with pdf output of many other programs (paragraphs can't be identified from each other anymore).
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to do most of these tasks, and much speedier, in a program like UR, on the condition that
- it comes, as UR does (and not many such programs do...), with perfect, and immediately available item (and even sub-tree in case) cloning
- you make use of that cloning, and you also make use of "separator items", in order to create clusters (just create an item with 10, and another with 20 (e.g.) underlines (_), then copy those to wherever in the (sub-) tree they are needed
- you make use of the sub-tree creation functionality, obviously, and you might benefit greatly from the newly implemented Tree - Show - Level ... command group, and as said before, in both directions, i.e. "going down" and "going up"
- you will have
2 dozen (or so) item formats, in order to distinguish the different element kinds of your decision / analysis process, hence my asking for
32 flags, instead of just 10 or 12 (whilst my personal, immediate problem in UR would be resolved with just 10 or 12, i.e. the "mythical 7" PLUS the minimum of "ToDo"s)
As for the necessary terminology, there are books on the subject(s) of course, but you might refer to pages 49 to 59 in particular, of the (free) pdf "(The) Elements of Southbeach Notation 0.9.6" which you can download from a link "Southbeach Notation 0.9" right at the very bottom of
https://www.southbeachinc.com/index.html , or you can click on the first "Gallery" screenshot thumbnail on
https://www.southbeachinc.com/product.html , then on the screenshot, click for the next one, and so on, to get some ideas (I would not endorse their "Modeller" though since after a brief trial, I can't say it's "intuitive", and I was unable to export the above-mentioned "Notes", but that might have been my fault then).
Especially from the pdf pages, you'll get all terms you'll need, together with plenty of handy synonyms - as implied, those 11 pdf pages are a real
gold mine (Roget's Thesaurus on speed for that subject) -, to employ then, as far as your individual situation is concerned, within your UR decision / analysis tree(s).
(EDIT: Clarification / Additions: I didn't want to say you should employ the terms within the tree: Of course, you could do that even today, e.g. PROB: the problem in case, or RISK: ..., CHANCE: ..., and so on, but that would not really promote your thinking; you should instead create a list of your preferred / best suited terminology (see the synonyms), together with base color scheme (e.g. risks = violet) and a (consistent) hue scheme (e.g. lighter = less probable, whilst italics would e.g. mean "less important, less needed, less harmful") - or rather the other way round: lesser probability by italics, lesser importance / impact by lighter hue, and/or you might additionally use leading characters like exclamation points and question marks (the latter for doubts, obviously), simple, or then double ones, in order to "weight" the remark's claim (and which would "free" some such hues for more kinds of elements, and possibly you could employ even some symbols (big dots or squares, etc., from special "smiley" collections, but only as far as they are "allowed" = correctly represented within UR's Data Explorer...) and of course, just a simple, leading "> " would indicate effects -, and then you would, after a while, intuitively "recognize" the element kinds and their respective significance while "musing", thinking about the elements; while rearranging existing, adding new ones: while finding better approaches, solutions even, etc. - and indeed, I'd claim, and since the temporal dimension (i.e. from one situation to the next) is quite badly represented in the flowcharts paradigm, "doing it" within the above-describe workflow instead (i.e. in UR, with separators and cloning) will be as effective in most cases, since at the end of the day, that's what flowcharts will have to do, too: separate new / alternative situations from old / previous ones, i.e. minimize the number of elements in every sub-scenario, since otherwise any (re-) thinking process will seriously be hampered (if not outright stalled) by what you could call "element number overflow".)
As said, for most such tasks, the flowcharter paradigm is not needed, but can conveniently be replaced by the above-described UR workflow, smartly deploying some base colors, formatting (bolding, italicizing), and then color shades (i.e. tones, hues) for "degrees"; about two dozen (or just a very little bit more) should be sufficient indeed, since immediate, intuitive recognition would be capital.