Understanding the Role of User Interface for Multi-Criteria Decision-Making in Supporting Exploratory Usage of Information Systems

Abstract

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is one of the essential tasks people encounter in their everyday use of information systems. In MCDM, people weigh the relative importance of multiple decision criteria to assess decision candidates. Such an MCDM task is ubiquitous yet can be cognitively taxing without the explicit support of user interfaces (UIs). However, there has been a lack of approaches aiming at systemically understanding how the design of UIs can affect users' attitudes and behavior in performing their exploratory use of information systems under MCDM scenarios. To better understand the role of UIs in MCDM, we determine two factors in characterizing UI for MCDM; (1) the internal representation, the way that UI frames end-users in determining preferences of decision criteria (i.e., individual, proportional, and pairwise quantifies), and (2) the external representation, the way that UI externalizes user preferences while the users interact with systems (1D and 2D layouts). We conducted two studies to understand how different design choices affect users' MCDM processes. We found 2D layout improves a set of attitudinal aspects in MCDM scenarios while using different quantifiers introduces a set of trade-offs.