Consesnsus: Visualizing Points Of Disagreement For Multi-Criteria Collaborative Decision Making

Groups often face difficulty reaching consensus. For complex decisions with multiple latent criteria, discourse alone may impede groups from pinpointing fundamental disagreements. To help support a consensus building process, we introduce ConsensUs, a novel visualization tool that highlights disagreements in comparative decisions. The tool facilitates groups to specify comparison criteria and to quantify their subjective opinions across these criteria. ConsensUs then highlights salient differences between members. An evaluation with 87 participants shows that ConsensUs helps individuals identify points of disagreement within groups and leads people to align their scores more with the group opinion. We discuss the larger design space for supporting the group consensus process, and our future directions to extend this approach to large-scale decision making platforms.