Feature request: voting on feature requests!

it's true, we definitely plan to add that into the "ideas" area. question: are there certain sites that do voting/ranking that you particularly like, and why? we're looking @ a number of different potential implementations and trying to figure out what would work best for satisfaction, so any guidance you can give us would be much appreciated.

I like Digg because the voting is easy. The company I work for now has a way of voting for things, but you have to vote on a scale of 1 to 10 for every enhancement. This is too much work for the end user in my opinion. I think voting should be yes or now; or yes or nothing.

On a side note, I really think this would add the usefulness of this site! I know at the company I work for, we've been looking for a good way to determine demand for enhancement requests to our software, and this site looks like a clean, easy way to do that, but voting is a crucial component.

If you want to take that a step further, weighted voting would be even better. If you could take a look at the registered users and pick a weight for them. For example, client that's a close business partner may get more weight than someone who just got the software and hasn't yet received training on it. This would help tremendously.

Just a thought!

and a really helpful one, swingkat -- thanks! we're definitely going to be adding some sort of voting/ranking capability to the "ideas" area of the site.

we're looking @ a couple of different models. what was the issue with 1-10, exactly -- too many numbers? because we really like the threadless model, which is all about ranking + allowing the company to be the final arbiter, and theirs is 0-5 plus an "i'd buy it!" box; see here. we worry that a digg style "yes!" vote, or even a "thumbs up/thumbs down" model won't provide enough valuable feedback...

what do you think?

The problem with numbers is that it's subjective. One person's 4 may be another person's 3, etc. One person may take the time to give an accurate rating (5 for the best feature idea, 3 for a medium idea, 1 for bad idea), whereas another person may just give 5's to every idea they like and not vote on the ideas they don't like. It introduces inconsistencies into the data analysis.

By implementing just a simple 'Yes' system or a 'Yes/No' system, you can get very meaningful data. A user says "Yes" to any idea they'd like to see. At the end of the day, you tally that number for each feature and you have a clear objective winner. Introducing the No just gives you a measurement in the opposite direction--how many people would not like to see the feature at all.

Dreamhost does something like this for their feature request system and it works fairly well:


They do introduce one extra level of complexity though which is that you have to "pay" for your votes using a credit system (no monetary value, just forces people to pick and choose the features they want to vote for). I don't think you'd need that additional layer of complexity.

Though I love the idea swingkat mentioned giving certain stakehholders more weight than others. ;-)

chucksense,

Thanks for the response. One thing to keep in mind that despite the relativities of a 1-10 scoring system, very meaningful data can be derived.

Thor has more info on this, but one of the most valuable numbers used in customer satisfaction analysis is a ranking derived from a 1-10 scale. I don't remember the specifics, but the important part of it is that it is powered by the percentage of people who voted a 9 or a 10 for your product. Every other ranking submitted is only used as padding.

i really like this idea. "just simple enough" is the key. a 5 star system from bad idea to great idea might work for ranking ideas. if the user has a history of voting, you can use that person's "average" vote to understand their relative vote on an idea vs other users to see how to weigh them. can you ask a user to rank from 1 to 10 the importance to them of a set of ideas?

all of my companies struggle with how to manage the process of feedback and prioritization. there are bug lists and feature requests and then how to prioritize bugs vs features from all the different opinions: customers, product managers, customers, partner, ceo, board, advisors, bloggers, etc. how do you weigh the inputs of the ceo vs the input of engineers who are building the product. in most companies, the engineers don't seem to get enough say. how to follow the history of a user and how often people agree with them. if they have been identified as a source of good ideas, does their weight go up? should Michael Arrington's opinion on what a company should do carry more weight? would love to see you guys figure this out.

ideas.salesforce.com was a good idea, but there are bugs and features and other things mixed in so i don't find it that useful. need at least a few different catagories...

Scott: on your comment about customer satisfaction analysis, there is a great harvard business review article on this topic. "the one number that matters". they say you only need to ask one question around how likely are you to refer this company/product/etc to your friends and colleagues. you give them a range of choices from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

the people who vote strongly agree and those that vote strongly disagree are the only ones that matter, as those are the ones who will talk about the company. the promoters will give you positive word of mouth, the detractors will give you negative word of mouth. they show some nice graphs that map "net promoters" percentage (strong agree minus strongly disagree) and show how that nicely correlates to growth rates. southwest airlines has a high net promoter number, united airlines very low for example. and it maps nicely to their growth rates/company value.

this might be an easy feature for you guys to use to let consumers rate companies quickly. just ask users one question about each company that they view....

Tim, I think you're right on with everything you're saying. We're hearing similar feedback from companies large and small about both the idea ranking (and "co-creation" in general) and the Net Promoter score. I'm looking forward to using these features ourselves, too!

I like the thumbs up only model as it's black and white simple for the end user.

Check out User Suggest - it's currently in alpha, but you can see their page here (http://usersuggest.usersuggest.com/) and I think it has the right idea. Yeah, its just one more thing to have with your company (a site, a blog, GetSatisfaction, a Myspace, a Facebook fan page, etc) but maybe it'll offer in the meantime something you can use.

Any news on how far off a Polling feature is? That would be pretty much the one feature I still miss to make this a complete product for us.

Polls are definitely still something that we want to implement in our system. That said, we've got several pretty significant features and improvements in between now and working on polls. I would say at the very least it wouldn't be until the end of summer that we would start work on implementing polls.

That is, unless enough people want them right now :)

P.S. Thanks for bringing this back up again. I'll make sure we talk about it as a group on tuesday. Get everyone in the office rolling it around in our brains again.

Any update on this?

Josh, no update just yet. We definitely want polls, but we don't have it on our product roadmap. But, we're hard at work on that roadmap this week, and I'll put in a word for polls, for sure.

+1 for polls.

I'd like to be able to put up a multiple-choice poll like the ones on slashdot or livejournal. Any chance you could consider that alongside the +/- voting idea?

I like this idea and would love some sort of a voting system to be integrated for new ideas, feature request. That would be cool. Keep up the great work!

Any update on this feature? Is it still planned?

It is still a maybe.

Well, to clarify, we currently have voting UP on ideas, and a pending release is emphasizing this far more. What is a maybe is voting things DOWN.

We also have a management view which provides filtering abilities on multiple parameters, including votes. You can also download the ideas in Excel format and filter/sort there.

Hello, any update on that? sounds great