We’re excited to announce that voting is now available within Conceptboard. Voting, or as we like to say ‘dotmocracy’, enables teams to easily vote on their favorite ideas and reach decisions quicker.

What is Voting?

Voting is a tool that lets team members cast votes on their preferred option by posting a vote next to the preferred option.

Voting is a simple tool used to democratically make decisions in a group setting. Conceptboard’s online voting tool allows remote and distributed teams to narrow down alternatives and converge to a set of concepts or ideas, regardless of location.

Each team member is allocated multiple votes, and they can choose to cast them all towards one idea or distribute them across several.

Everyone casts their votes at the same time to ensure no one is influenced by other team members’ votes.

Once all the votes have been cast, the scores are revealed and the winning ideas can be prioritized.

New voting feature Conceptboard

When to use voting?

You can use voting any time your team needs to make a decision on ideas, projects or directions on a high stakes project.

It also can help if you are hitting a wall when it comes to making a final decision, or only a few voices are dominating the discussion.

Online voting is especially helpful for:

  • Workshops
  • Brainstorming sessions
  • UX design feature prioritization
  • Evaluating user insights
  • Ranking ideas that require group consensus
  • Design thinking

How to set up your own Voting round

Follow these steps to set up your own Voting round:

1. In the ‘+’ sidebar, click on “Insert widget”, and drag the voting widget onto your board:

    • This will create a voting area on your board. Any sticky notes, shapes, images, icons or files placed within this area will become votable objects.
    • Alternatively, you can select the votable objects on your board, right click, and select “Create voting widget”.
    • Simply deselect the black tick on any items you wish to exclude from voting, or drag them outside the voting box area.

2. The voting widget top bar will appear on the board

    • Board editors can choose how many votes each participant can cast. Click the up or down arrow to increase or decrease the number of votes. The maximum number of votes you can give each participant is 20. 
    • In a typical voting session, everyone gets more than one vote, so they can vote for multiple items or give all their votes to just one item.
    • Remember to check or uncheck the items you want to be included in the vote.

3. Hit start voting to begin voting

    • Participants can vote for an item by clicking ‘+‘, or revoke it by clicking ‘–‘. The top bar of the voting widget tracks the number of votes remaining.
    • You can use the Timer feature to set a time limit.
    • Give everyone a chance to vote in silence to avoid anyone being influenced.
    • Although cursors can still be seen during the voting process, you are only able to see your own votes on the board.
    • To make the process more anonymous, we kindly suggest that all users turn off cursors in the moderation box or via the board settings menu.

    • Technically, the voting feature is considered not to be anonymous. Please keep this in mind when choosing, what to vote on.

4. End voting

    • Once all the votes have been cast, the board editor can hit ‘end voting’ and the scores will appear on each item.
    • The bigger the score, the larger the circle. 
    • If you have a tie, select those items only and restart the voting to determine a clear winner.

voting feature template

Try it out

Why we love voting:

  • It prevents the HIPPO effect (the highest-paid person’s opinion gets the most weight).
  • Voting simultaneously helps avoid “groupthink” by ensuring everyone feels confident to vote on the idea they like the most, not the most popular item.
  • You can speed up the decision-making process by setting a time limit using the timer.
  • You can download the results.
  • It’s fun!

Give the Voting feature a try with your team today and see how easy it makes the decision-making process. Learn more about Voting in the help center. Happy collaborating!