Dotvoter
For: Philosophie
Timeline: 9 months in 2017
My skills: Interaction & interface design, Research, Product strategy, Front-end coding
Diverge. Converge. Save sticky notes. #
Tired of crowding around a wall with your team to place dot votes? Ever need to include remote teammates? Product consulting teams at Philosophie had problems like this almost every day. I led the design and development of Dotvoter to solve those problems.
Avoid groupthink! #
Private idea generation is typical in physical, sticky-note dot voting. So is public voting; everyone crowds around the sticky notes and places dot stickers. This often proves physically awkward in conference rooms, with participants shuffling around chairs and waiting for others to move. Public voting also allows voters to game votes and be influenced by groupthink. I didn't initially prioritize this groupthink for us to solve, but as we observed users with the first version of Dotvoter, it clearly surfaced as an early problem we could solve. So we built private voting. Once we launched it, nine out of ten teams started to always use private voting.
Key design decisions #
Dotvoting is often used in meetings and workshops. Participants bring various devices to these events and there’s often a big screen in the room. So, I designed Dotvoter to be accessible on phones, big screens, and everything between. Clickable elements are finger-friendly and fonts are readable from a big, distant conference room screen.
The color palette is primarily the original sticky note yellow, bright pink and teal. I intended this to evoke the bright, playful colors of many sticky notes. The typeface is Omnes Pro, which provides a friendly informality and, on the cards, suggests handwriting without sacrificing legibility to mimic the handwritten experience.
The impact #
Dotvoter transformed Philosophie culture. The CEO uses it during company-wide meetings. Product teams use it with clients during retros. People bring it with them to their new jobs when they leave Philosophie. There was organic adoption: 6,900 people cast over 22,300 votes on more than 21,000 ideas in two years without paid marketing effort.
Go create a board @dotvoterapp and decide something.
