Project Overview
Despite making up the majority of management ranks, line managers’ decision-making needs remain understudied. Moreover, technological supports for social decision-making have focused on domains where decision makers do not have close relationships with those impacted by their decisions.
Approach
Through formative research, we identified managerial communication and analysis needs that existing tools did not adequately support. To accommodate reasoning over a range of intuitive and calculative decision- making, we developed a technology probe that represents every decision as a multi-level value tree, which is generated using LLMs and connected to raw data in a spreadsheet.
Outcomes
Our work discusses how the design of social decision-making supports, especially in the workplace, can more explicitly support highly interactional social decision-making (Khadpe et al., 2024).
References
2024
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DISCERN: Designing Decision Support Interfaces to Investigate the Complexities of Workplace Social Decision-Making With Line Managers
In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, USA, Sep 2024
Line managers form the first level of management in organizations, and must make complex decisions, while maintaining relationships with those impacted by their decisions. Amidst growing interest in technology-supported decision-making at work, their needs remain understudied. Further, most existing design knowledge for supporting social decision-making comes from domains where decision-makers are more socially detached from those they decide for. We conducted iterative design research with line managers within a technology organization, investigating decision-making practices, and opportunities for technological support. Through formative research, development of a decision-representation tool—DISCERN—and user enactments, we identify their communication and analysis needs that lack adequate support. We found they preferred tools for externalizing reasoning rather than tools that replace interpersonal interactions, and they wanted tools to support a range of intuitive and calculative decision-making. We discuss how design of social decision-making supports, especially in the workplace, can more explicitly support highly interactional social decision-making.
