User-centered design of preference elicitation interfaces for decision support

Abstract

A crucial aspect for the success of systems that provide decision or negotiation support is a good model of their user's preferences. Psychology research has shown that people often do not have well-defined preferences. Instead they construct them during the elicitation process. This implies that the interaction between the system and a user can greatly influence the quality of the preference information and the user's acceptance of the results provided by the system. In this paper we describe a user-centered approach to design preference elicitation interfaces. First, we extracted a number of criteria for successful design of preferences elicitation interfaces from literature and current systems designs. Second we constructed four new intermediate designs that are compositional with respect to different criteria and, furthermore correspond to different thinking styles of the user. Last, we offer first insights from an initial formative evaluation of our designs. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.