Tips & Tricks

• The whole team benefits from the fact that ideas are assessed as objectively as possible, which means that their own ideas are not prioritized. Encourage people to be open to new ideas and not only vote for what they already know.
• Provide clear instructions: Make it clear to your participants what the subject of your dot voting is. Make certain that the choice criteria are understandable to all parties. What exactly is the goal? Which choice is the most innovative or the most practical?
• Have few alternatives: Reduce the amount of available alternatives to the bare minimum. Before giving their points, participants should double-check all of their alternatives. Participants may get overwhelmed if there are too many possibilities.
• Use different alternatives. Avoid alternatives that are comparable. Avoid selections that are similar to one another since they may result in a vote splitting. This may need the combination of alternatives in order to be less specific.
• Keep group impacts to a minimum. The majority of the time, individuals vote on alternatives that have already been selected by other users.  As an example of the Bandwagon effect, individuals will often just connect the dots where everyone else has connected them, without taking into consideration their own opinions on all the choices.
• Use various colored dots to represent distinct values, such as green for “like” and red for “dislike,” for example.
• Use of various colored dots to represent distinct categories of people, for example, blue dots for teachers and red ones for students