Vote and Be Heard: Adding Back-Channel Signals to Social Mirrors

In face-to-face group situations, social pressure and organizational hierarchy relegate the less outspoken to silence, often resulting in fewer voices, fewer ideas, and groupthink. However, in mediated interaction like email, more people join in the discussion to offer their opinion. With this work, we aim to combine the benefits of mediated communication with the benefits and affordances of face-to-face interaction by adding a mediated back-channel. We describe Conversation Votes, a tabletop system that augments verbal conversation with a shared anonymous back-channel to highlight agreement. We then discuss a study of our design with groups engaged in repeated discussion. Our results show that anonymous visual back-channels provide a medium for the underrepresented voices of a conversation and balances interaction among all participants.