Using argumentation visualization to foster transparency of development processes

The literature shows that providing information about alternatives and arguments in development processes may increase stakeholders’ perceived transparency of the process and the results’ acceptance. In development processes with a high number of stakeholders this has been shown to be one of the main prerequisites for project success. According to previous studies, stakeholders prefer graph visualizations to textual representations (like e.g. protocols) to retrace underlying decision-making processes. In this study, we evaluate how the presentation of reasoning in five different forms of argumentation visualization influences perceived transparency of the process. Our results indicate that the the type of argumentation visualization used strongly influences perceived transparency of development processes. Based on our study, we provide decision support, which kind of visualization should be used to target different dimensions of perceived transparency.