Exploring the Design Space of Three Criteria Decision Making

This article presents different interface designs of sliders to support decision-making problems with three criteria. We present an exploration of the design space through an iterative development process with eight prototypes and the results of several evaluation studies with visualization experts and nonexperts. Our findings show three candidates for consideration: a standard ternary triangular slider, a novel circular slider, and a standard basic slider displayed three times. All three were considered intuitive and easy to use. The triangular slider is best for exploration with vague user intuition, the circular slider performs best for preference comparisons, and the parallel slider is best for direct preference setting.