Assessment User Interface: Supporting the Decision-making Process in Participatory Processes

We introduce a novel intelligent user interface for assessing contributions submitted in participatory planning and decision processes. It assists public administrations in decision making by recommending ranked contributions that are similar to a reference contribution based on their textual content. This allows the user to group contributions in order to treat them consistently which is crucial in this domain. Presently, the assessment process is done manually with no sophisticated computer-aided support. The assessment user interface provides a two-column layout with a basic list of contributions in the left column and a list of similar contributions in the right column. We present results of a user study that we conducted with 21 public administration workers to evaluate the proposed interface. We found that the assessment user interface is well suited to the assessment task and the related decision-making process. But there are also unclear elements in the ranking visualization as well as some distrust in the ranked contributions or intelligent methods among the participants.