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Vote multiple times for a same project

Pauline Bessoles

26/11/2020 10:34

UPDATED ON APRIL 8, 2021

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

With the actual voting systems on participatory budgets, users can vote according to a percentage of the total budget, or with a min or max of projects to be voted on. The problem is that they can't express any preference for a specific project by granting it several votes.

As a user voting in participatory budget process, I want to express different levels of support to the projects I'm voting for.

As an admin I might want to implement rules to register that information and adapt my vote tally accordingly.

Describe the solution you'd like

Admin side (see mockup)

The creation of a new voting rule taking as input 2 parameters :

The total number of votes available to each user;
The maximum number of votes that can be allocated to each project;

This new voting rule is not compatible with the current existing rules.

It will be necessary to remove the check that blocks the selection of a project several times by the user to develop this functionality.

User side

This is where the complexity in term of UX of the implementation lies.

We set some preliminary constraints upstream:

The interface must work on any type of device;
The interface must be accessible (RGAA);
The interface must adapt to different values set in the parameters of the rules;
e.g.: if the number of votes authorised per project is set to 10 or 20, it shoudn't be a problem for the interface.

The project index

In addition, the Decidim product team has decided to simplify the interface for the proposals cards, vote buttons will no longer be displayed on the cards to reduce the amount of info shown to users.

This applies to budget project, we plan to anticipate this evolution as part of the development of this functionality. See mockup for projects index.

The voting interface

We investigated 4 types of interfaces for this user interaction :

Incremental vote buttons
Input steppers
Star ratings
Sliders

See the mockups attached. Our team is in favour of implementing the input steppers as

they scale well if many votes can be given to a single project,
the increase / decrease vote allocation interaction is clear for user
the budget order is built like an e-commerce order, input steppers are widely used to set quantities

Does this issue could impact on users private data?

Provide new option to support a proposal: with a scale (External link)

A study conducted by Toulouse about voting methods on participatory budgeting (External link) (in french)

Funded by

Toulouse

Filter results for category: Budgets

List of Endorsements

Antti Hukkanen

Oliver Azevedo Barnes

Virgile Deville

Henrik Pässler

and 1 more person (see more) (see less)

Reference: MDC-PROP-2020-11-15813

Version number 4 (of 4) see other versions

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18 comments

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Conversation with Pauline Bessoles

Pauline Bessoles

26/11/2020 10:37

@ahu @carol @paarals @andres @furilo do you have any insights?

Pau Parals

26/11/2020 10:43

maybe quadratic voting is an option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting. did you think about it?

Virgile Deville

26/11/2020 15:15

This is a different feature that I'm dying for to exist.
Once the feature described in the proposal we'll be one step closer to implement quadratic voting in Decidim.

Antti Hukkanen

26/11/2020 11:00

This is great @Pops for re-introducing this proposal!

For the questions:
- I'd keep the voting button.
- I'd keep the "cost" of each vote the same. Quadratic voting is another topic and separate to this particular issue.
- I think this should be compatible with all voting rules. With budget based voting each vote would just accumulate the project's cost to the total budget.

How the user would pick the same project multiple times: IMO, they would just click the vote button multiple times and that would accumulate the same project to the total budget every time it is added. There would be some number or icon shown close to the button how many times it has been added.

If they want to remove it, they need to remove all votes from that project and start again.

This would be probably good to iterate this through with a UI designer through a couple of iterations and test it with real people. The voting feature is already complicated to many people, so KISS.

Antti Hukkanen

26/11/2020 11:04

Small clarification:
I mean they could still remove one project from their vote but removing that project would remove all the votes for that project.

Pauline Bessoles

27/11/2020 10:31

Thanks a lot for your answer Antti! I agree, this should be tested with real users in some way.
I made a new mockup integrating your feedbacks : https://imgur.com/nLZkCzG What do you think?
In order to add a graphic visualization to let the user know where she's at with her votes, I added a button "fade": the button would become more opaque the more you give the projects votes.

In this mockup, this feature is used with the Min&max number of projects feature, which allows you to vote between 1 and 6 projects -> you have 6 votes. The wording should be changed (projects->votes).

Antti Hukkanen

27/11/2020 11:23

Thanks a lot @Pops - This looks already really good to me.

Regarding the opaqueness, I think this might be an accessibility problem. I'd prefer some other way of indicating how much the user has voted on a single project. Either show the exact number or some kind of icons/indicators to show how many votes you've given to the single project.

Not so fancy as your mockups but here's also some quick ideas to demonstrate what I proposed above.

Budget based voting:
https://www.figma.com/proto/oIOhQQYYb4dYs3yez5JMbi/Decidim-Weighted-Voting?node-id=1%3A2&scaling=min-zoom

Project based voting:
https://www.figma.com/proto/oIOhQQYYb4dYs3yez5JMbi/Decidim-Weighted-Voting?node-id=4%3A63&scaling=min-zoom

Antti Hukkanen

27/11/2020 11:24

We've also seen in actual use that the checkbox icon for the selection seem to be problematic for many users. They think clicking the checkbox is enough and they don't click the "Vote" button at the end. It's not particularly related to this issue but I think having the text "add to vote" in the button might help understanding that clicking the button in the project is not enough.

Virgile Deville

01/12/2020 09:13

@ahu I find your proposal really clear and easy to navigate. @pops what do you think ?

Pauline Bessoles

01/12/2020 09:26

I also think it's the most usable proposal for the accessibility reasons Antti is raising!
I'd also like to have @carol feedbacks about this, but this already seems very good @virgile_deville

álvaro ortiz

26/11/2020 14:38

I don't have many experiences with budget voting, so take my words with perspective. Some general comments:

I see the main change is that you have a credit of votes you can spend on several proposals. UX wise, I think it's important that is very clear how many votes have you spent at any given moment and for each proposal, and that it's easy to cancel/reduce your votes to a given proposal (because as you go on reviewing proposals you discover items you want to support more, so you have to reduce votes for one proposal and give it to the new one)
In the attachment you share, am I seeing my votes or everyone's votes? (I don't know if everybody's votes should be shown at this stage, maybe not)
(...continue ->)

álvaro ortiz

26/11/2020 14:40

Do we really need to allow infinite number of votes to an specific project? Maybe this would block people more than help? Maybe just being able to assign 1-10 votes to a project is easier? Which takes me to the scale design... :) If this is going to be implemented, maybe it makes sense to limit the number of UI elements that we create, and reuse this scheme?
An element that I think would need to be defined is the counter of votes you have left, which should be present at all times (but alas, I would need to understand the complete flow of how the voting would occur)

Anyhow, yet more questions than answers ;)

Pauline Bessoles

27/11/2020 10:41

Thanks for your feedbacks álvaro!
I agree, the total of votes you have left should stay below the progress bar (may be make it sticky would allow it to be visible at any time).
About showing total votes, I also think it can be confusing, but this is already a config flag in Budgets step settings, so the admin could decide if it's appropriate in her user case.

Regarding the number of votes for a specific project, I also think that a limit should be established (it doesn't make sense to be able to vote more than 10 or 15 times for a same project). But I think that putting a mandatory number for admins won't answer to every use case. I like the idea of the scale on the project page, but the main problem is to make it fit in the projects list cards.

In the mockup I published in my answer to Antti, may be I should add in the projects selection the number of votes allocated to the projects (at the left of the bin icon?).

Anyway, thanks again for your feedbacks!

Conversation with Pauline Bessoles

Pauline Bessoles

04/12/2020 13:46

Hi to all following this proposal!

I made a second iteration of what this feature would look like in BE and in FE (on the projects index).
You can find the mockup here: https://www.figma.com/proto/SjLsHxOSVsNUn71d1PQpn9/Metadecidim?node-id=8%3A176&viewport=703%2C436%2C0.10763725638389587&scaling=scale-down-width

The idea here is to create a new separated voting rule, that wouldn't be compatible with the others.
@ahu After iterating on the eventuality of making this feature compatible with all the voting rules, I'm afraid that would be really confusing, for the admin and for the users. Tell me if you want me to post them here!

Antti Hukkanen

04/12/2020 18:38

Looks really good to me @Pauline !

One thing I'd like to add would be a button/link to remove the project from the vote next to the project controls on the right side. I guess it could be also just an [X] button at the top corner with a screen reader label attached to it.

It would be also good to think how this will align on mobile. Especially among the youth, mobile usage is around 70-80% of the users and the budget voting view we have right now is not very understandable on mobile.

I understand the complexity related making it compatible with the budget based voting. I haven't heard of such request yet, so I think it's probably OK making it a separate rule.

Pauline Bessoles

07/12/2020 13:59

Thanks for your feedbacks, I forgot to add the remove button! I added it in the previous mockup, tell me if you think that's understandable for the user.

You can find the mobile mockup here : https://www.figma.com/proto/SjLsHxOSVsNUn71d1PQpn9/Metadecidim?node-id=47%3A981&viewport=510%2C436%2C0.1859215945005417&scaling=min-zoom