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

In face-to-face group situations, social pressure and organizational hierarchy relegate the less outspoken into silence, often resulting in fewer voices, fewer ideas, and group-think. However, in mediated interaction, such as email, it has been shown that more people join in the discussion. 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 for 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.