[Design] voting buttons

[David Neeley]

Why not have "voting buttons" be a basic icon that could be dragged into the appropriate message (email, instant messaging, presentation file, whatever). That way, you'd drag the icon onto your page and fill in the label for the button (if different than default). Otherwise, the object wouldn't get in the way when it's not appropriate. 
  
David 

-----Original Message----- 

I'd like to see voting buttons in Chandler, similar to the voting 
buttons in Microsoft Outlook. (Crossposted from Design to Process 
because there are some implications for my Process thread on 
care&feeding of volunteers.) 

Below, I give a brief description of how voting buttons work in 
Outlook, followed by why they are useful, followed by some extensions 
that I'd like in Chandler. 

WHAT ARE VOTING BUTTONS? 

Voting buttons, for those of you who haven't seen them, are pretty 
cool (though Outlook's UI for them leaves a few things to be 
desired). When you compose a message, you say that you want to 
include voting buttons and describe what should be on the buttons. 
Your correspondent then sees the message body, followed by buttons 
with the text that you selected. For example, your correspondent 
might see: 

Which entree would you like at the company party? 

[Chicken] [Beef] [Vegetarian] 

where [foo] indicates a button with the label "foo". 

Your correspondent clicks on a button, hits send (optionally entering 
some text), and off the vote goes. 

When your Outlook receives the response, it tallies/summarizes it on 
a page that is attached to your outgoing message. (Note: doing so 
makes it hard to find in Outlook. I suspect it should become an 
incoming message in Chandler.) 

You can look at the voting at any time to see both a summary count 
Chicken 15 Beef 23 Vegetarian 172 
and an exact list of each person's vote: 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood Vegetarian 
James Garner Beef 
Felix the Cat Chicken 
Hannibal Lechter Vegetarian 
etc. 

WHY IS THIS USEFUL? 

I don't think I need to explain why the company party planner would like this. 

It's also useful if you want to *discourage* responses. Suppose 
you've got a very chatty correspondent, and don't want to wade 
through two paragraphs of blather when all you wanted was a Yes or No. 

Finally, it's useful for low-bandwidth side-channel information. For 
example, we could have feedback buttons on the Design list: 
[Great idea!] [Might be good] [Not sure] [Probably not worth the effort] 
That would be very useful to distinguish between 
things people really want in Chandler 
vs. 
things that are fun to brainstorm about. 

It would also give the posters feedback that someone out there is 
listening to them -- without having a whole lot of "Me too!" messages 
clogging the list (and/or the poster's inbox). 

If you wanted to really make yourself feel good, leave off the 
negative feedback buttons and only put the positive ones on: 
[Great idea!] [Good idea] [Good idea, but probably too much trouble] 

PROPOSED EXTENSIONS 

It would be useful to allow anonymous voting. 

PLEASE make it easier to discover and use than Outlook's buttons. 

It would be nice to have templates (e.g. the [Great idea!] set above) 

It would be nice if list management software could attach the 
templates *for* the posters (so that e.g. all Design list postings 
have the [Great idea!] buttons. 
-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood 
Author of the _Overcome Email Overload_ series, http://www.EmailOverload.com 
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