Sung-Chul Lee
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Online chat is an emerging channel for discussing community problems. It is common practice for communities to assign dedicated moderators to maintain a structured discussion and enhance the problem-solving experience. However, due to the synchronous nature of online chat, moderators face a high managerial overhead in tasks like discussion stage management, opinion summarization, and consensus-building support. To assist moderators with facilitating a structured discussion for community problem-solving, we introduce SolutionChat, a system that (1) visualizes discussion stages and featured opinions and (2) recommends contextually appropriate moderator messages. Results from a controlled lab study (n=55, 12 groups) suggest that participants' perceived discussion trackability was significantly higher with SolutionChat than without. Also, moderators provided better summarization with less effort and better managerial support using system-generated messages with SolutionChat than without. With SolutionChat, we envision untrained moderators to effectively facilitate chat-based discussions of important community matters.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376609
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)