UX Design, Implementation and Evaluation for a Social Choice Board Game App

Abstract

Computational social choice systems can support collective decisions, but their practical value depends on whether people can understand, influence, and accept the decision process. Group board-game allocation makes this problem concrete because participants need to coordinate preferences, player counts, teaching knowledge, familiarity, and possible multi-table assignments, while existing tools provide limited support for shared control and explanation. In this setting of collective decision-making, this thesis implements a human-centred framework for structuring information flow between participants and allocation algorithms. The framework is realised through PickNPlay, a participant-directed web system for collaborative game entry, tiered preference input, Z3-backed allocation, progress visibility, revision, and explanation, and extended through Boardot, an exploratory shared-station facilitation layer. Exploratory HCI sessions using observation, SUS questionnaires, interviews, follow-up material, and thematic analysis found that PickNPlay was rated as more usable over the formative Boardroom BGVS baseline, while Boardot showed comparable descriptive usability and made allocation more visible as a shared room-scale event. The findings suggest that solver-backed allocation becomes more acceptable when participants can see, shape, and revise the decision process. The thesis contributes a human-centred account of group board-game allocation as shared interaction infrastructure, showing how constrained collective decisions can be made more socially usable through transparency, recoverable coordination, and bounded facilitation.