Propose new features
Designing Decidim together
Show a guidance modal in PB voting after selecting the first project
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Many people do not confirm their votes. According to our statistics, the numbers vary but they are generally between 5-20% of the votes.
If up to 20% of the people do not understand how to vote, something must be wrong. We are trying to tackle this issue using various different methods, including email notifications for unconfirmed votes which we recently implemented in the core. But there must be more that we can do to tackle this.
Describe the solution you'd like
We are trying to add another layer of help for the voters to better understand how the process works by introducing a guidance modal that pops up on the user's screen after they add the first project to their vote. This modal would guide users that they still need to do something in order to cast their vote.
The popup content should be as simple as possible, not overloading the user's cognitive understanding as many help texts in Decidim are now doing (such as the voting rules guidance which our customers generally ask to hide completely as it does not make any sense to other than technical people).
The suggestion for the content in the popup is as follows:
- Title: "Your vote has not yet been cast"
- Description (below title): You need to cast your vote for it to be counted in the final result.
- Three icons describing the process:
- Pick the plans
- Confirm your vote
- Cast your vote
- A button stating: "I understand how to vote" (closes the popup
Describe alternatives you've considered
We are trying to tackle this issue using several ways of which some we have been able to provide back to the core:
- Making sure each user has a confirmed email under their account which allows sending messages to them (during the first 3rd party login where email address is currently not confirmed) - Our suggestion was NOT accepted by the product team
- Adding notification emails for people who have left their vote unconfirmed - Our suggestion was accepted to the core
Additional context
We are currently implementing this for a client and we will be testing this in real life in April 2022, along with the email notifications feature which is already in the core.
On the first round of voting on the same instance, there was a large amount of people who did not confirm their votes. If we get more people to confirm their votes this year, this should be an indication that our strategies were successful.
We will report back the results after we get numbers from the voting.
Attached in this proposals is a UI mockup of what the popup could look like on top of the budgeting view.
Does this issue could impact on users private data?
No
Funded by
We are currently implementing this for a client and Mainio Tech can fund the efforts for bringing the feature to the core (if accepted)
This proposal is being evaluated
This proposal is affected by the redesign process and will be used as feedback for the design team.
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Conversation with Antti Hukkanen
This is by the way working really well. We tried this with one customer and it reduced the amount of incomplete votes to less than half.
Now we are using it with another customer and we are seeing exactly similar results.
The only difference between these two cases was that for the first one we also had the email reminders but for the second one we did not have the email reminders. There didn't seem to be much effect on the email reminders at least in these cases.
But the popup was working extremely well. I will gather some stats and post here in the near future but I can say already this definitely worked with 2 customers already.
That's great news, Antti! Thanks for the feedback, we've already passed it on to the redesign team for their consideration in the flow.
Here's some stats I am publishing with our client's permission:
- On the first round of PB we had 26,7% of the votes left unconfirmed - this was a major issue for them, the city hall was almost thinking of rejecting the whole voting result because of this issue
- On the second round with these changes, we had 6,3% of the votes left unconfirmed
So this means that 80% of the people who did not confirm their vote without the changes, confirmed them now. There was also a major increase in the number of voters and also this was the second time, so those can also have some effect on the numbers presented here.
The changes that we did for them:
1. Added the exit confirmation modal in the budgeting voting if you try to leave the budgeting component or log out (already a Decidim feature)
2. The explanation popup shown in this proposal (proposed)
3. Email reminders for people who did not confirm their votes (coming in next Decidim version)
Of these three, 1 and 2 worked the best. The email confirmation had a significant effect but it seems the two other ones were most important changes.
Regarding the email confirmations alone, 95,2% of people confirmed their votes without reminding them by email even once. Which indicates that for 95,2% of people, the first two changes were enough.
Those people who received the email reminder (4,8% of the total mass):
- 48,8% of people who were reminded by email only needed 1 reminder to confirm their vote
- 23,8% of people who were reminded by email needed 2 reminders to confirm their vote
- 27,3% of people who were reminded by email needed 3 reminders to confirm their vote
So it seems without the email reminders we would've had about 10,8% of the total mass who did not confirm their vote, assuming none of them returned back to the voting.
We are testing only changes 1 and 2 without the email reminders right now with another customer. There we are also already seeing a major significant drop in the amount of unconfirmed votes. We will report back about those number more specifically in case we get the permission to publish them and once the voting is finished.
For the people who left their votes unconfirmed, we reminded them as follows:
- 37,4% of the unconfirmed votes received 1 reminder
- 22,3% of the unconfirmed votes received 2 reminders
- 37,1% of the unconfirmed votes received 3 reminders
- 3,3% of the unconfirmed votes were not reminded at all
To be noted here that the earlier you started the voting, the more reminders we had time to send.
Really useful stats!
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