Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
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 has been accepted and is under development
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Conversation with Pierre Mesure
I personally still think that it should be possible to configure the component so that no ballot confirmation step is needed. With an e-mail notification and a UI that reflects the fact that the ballot is valid, even if users can continue editing it until the voting phase ends.
How would that work?
1) I vote for a project
2) I receive an email saying that "You've voted this project"
3) I vote for another project
4) I'll receive another email? Or I'll not receive this second email?
Maybe more an e-mail an hour after the person hasn't added any new projects to their ballot. The e-mail could say something like: "Thank you for voting in the XXX PB, here are the projects you chose. You can still edit or cancel your vote until the XX/XX".
I don't remember exactly how CONSUL does this but it's worth looking at.
To me it seems Consul is not sending any confirm notifications about the votes. In Consul you just add the projects you like and then you can go on and continue your life normally. If you click "Submit my ballot" in Consul, it will just show a review of your ballot where you can still remove projects. If you go back to the voting page, nothing changed, you can still continue the voting and click "Submit my ballot" again to show your ballot.
Regarding Pierre's suggestion itself, there are valid use cases for both ways. In some cases we want the users to confirm the ballots but in that case I think the optimal way would be to do the voting in a "pipeline", similarly to how we do the voting in the elections module. I.e. enter the "voting booth" and you cannot exit the voting booth unless you a) cast the vote, b) click "exit voting" or c) close your browser. But we already have a bit of experience of that too and noticed that some people still leave the vote unconfirmed even when we had the "pipeline" approach.
In some other cases, we might not actually care so much whether the users confirm the votes. IMO this is more similar to having the proposals component configured with the "supports" feature, although I also understand the proposals component doesn't provide all the features that we have in budgets.
In case we want to support both use cases, I would imagine this could become a setting in the budgets component at some point. When we don't require "casting" the vote, we could skip also the email confirmation notifications or do it as Pierre suggested. This is perfectly doable with Decidim but I guess it's up to the product team to decide the best way for this.
In our experience the real problem is many times in the PB voting people are advertising the projects they want to promote and they send the link to the project page to their friends on social media. Then when you arrive on this page:
https://try.decidim.org/processes/cruelty-onion/f/4/budgets/2/projects/3
You intuitively think that it is enough to click the "Add to your vote" button to give support to your friend's project. After doing that, you think you are done and leave the site or sign out.
So this was the hypothesis why we added two features to the budgeting component:
- When trying to leave the budgeting component, show an exit modal which explains you have not yet voted (already a Decidim feature)
- When adding the first project, explain how the voting works (what is proposed here)
These two combined seem to work pretty well already.
I think the main problem is just that people don't generally understand what is the PB voting and how it works. We need to educate them better (and also avoid adding too much text which people won't read anyways, images are better than text).
I don't see any issue about this on GitHub: https://github.com/decidim/decidim/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22module%3A+budgets%22 Any updates about?
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