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Need better ways to get ideas reviewed and not get lost in the noise

260 points posted to IdeaStorm by gerrygiese Jun 11

What I wonder is based on the volume of "ideas" coming in (many of which seem duplicative, inane, or noise-level non-ideas), how can a more valid topic get more traffic to see if it really withstands community review? I think some of the stuff comes in so fast that many ideas never really get reviewed unless somebody is willing to scroll through pages and pages of recent "ideas" to find them.

I'd like to see a new tab or tabs dedicated to items that got more positive votes than negative, maybe at least a 3:1 ratio?. But these ideas are still under a certain threshold, either something like less than 200, or that have not received X number of votes in the past week.

The "ideas in action" weekly recaps are one way for dell employees to promote certain ideas. Can dell employees vote for ideas? If they can, and I think they should, since it's their company, and their votes should be worth more (20? 50?). If we create an idea and a dell employee likes it, why shouldn't they be able to promote it? Dell employees can obviously help sort the wheat from the chaff, so I say let 'em do it.

I might draw the line at letting dell employees creating ideas -- they have their own process for that. But on the other hand, I've heard of plenty of times where an employee had an idea but their manager thought it was stupid, so the employee left, started a new company, and went gangbusters, making the manager look like the stupid one. If a dell employee has an idea and they want the community to review it, I suppose why not?

gerrygiese
Jun 11		 BTW, the reason I created this idea is because I noticed my idea only got 13 votes, positive and negative, in roughly that many days. I looked at some of the other ideas, and noticed a trend in that the volume of ideas coming in per day appears to far outweigh the number of votes the ideas are getting per day. According to the 6/10 recap, there were 225 new users (http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2008/06/10/weekly-recap-6-10.aspx) in the past two weeks. Any idea posted two weeks ago should probably have at least 25-50 users (15% of *new* users) voting on the idea, either way. Ideastorm moderators -- I'd love to know if you guys are doing data mining or have or plan to set up monitoring thresholds and statistics that can address my informal seat-of-the-pants analysis. Even better, post the specs on how you run the site! The more transparency, the better!

Without enough votes, most "ideas" are in the noise level and probably not receiving the critical community review they really need. Is the problem with the "ideas" not really being ideas? Are too many poorly-rated ideas clogging up the system with out being removed? Is the website design not working? Should at least X number of votes be registered before an idea can be posted? How can we get more voting and attract a "stickier" audience? How can "idea" quality in the database be increased? Lots of questions, I've only got a few of the suggestions, hopefully others have more.
jervis961
Jun 11		 How would you gather votes on ideas that are not posted?
thebittersea
Jun 11		 gerrygiese, honestly, the implemented ideas ALL have over came this noise.
good ideas always shine through no matter what.
if your idea is confounded by noise... it's probably noise to begin with.
aikiwolfie
Jun 11		 What I've noticed is a lot of ideas are just very badly written. Some of them are even just statements that hold no meaning for anybody other than the author. A lot of other ideas are very specific to the authors "wants". Which aren't really the same as what everybody else wants. Often these ideas take the form of a custom system spec. Something that Dell really couldn't sell in volume. These are really the ideas that get ignored.

Other reasons ideas will get ignored are the inability to write in proper discrete sentences forming easy to read short concise paragraphs. Other people write a book. Which to be honest I can't be bothered reading. Massive blocks of endless text don't go down too well.

The ideas that get most votes say it all in the title. The description also sticks to the point. A side from the odd typo or spelling mishap. Grammar is good, the author uses proper sentences and paragraphs. The author may also use links, images or videos to further illustrate the idea.

It's all about being able to communicate.
winoffice
Jun 11		 I shall demote this idea, because Dell employees should not be able to vote on ideas. Besides, that way they could intentionally demote just to take away 20 or 50 points from the idea and keep the idea with a lower score.
aikiwolfie
Jun 12		 What? Why the not? We're always badgering Jackie to get more Dell people participating on IdeaStorm? I'm also betting most Dell employees buy Dell PCs. I have no problem with Dell people voting. Thus far the Dell folks that have taken the time to participate mostly seem to have liked our ideas and probably would have voted for them.
gerrygiese
Jun 13		 thebittersea: Maybe I didn't communicate very well, but the implemented ideas so far came when the database of ideas was smaller, and also when the volume of new ideas per day was lower (I think). As 'aikiwolfie' points out, there are more and more poorly written ideas, unimlementable ideas, or blindiingly obious bad ideas being posted. If the sheer volume of ideas and the ratio of ones worth considering (I didn't say they were bad or good, just worth considering) is outweighed by the ones that are "lame", the the stuff worth considering gets missed by the community since not very many people are going to click over to the "recent ideas" tab and read pages and pages of ideas and vote for each one.

aikiwolfe & winoffice: good comment, and I probably put too many ideas under one umbrella. I'll be shorter and more concise next time.
gerrygiese
Jun 14		 This "idea" has had more people vote for it that my actual product idea: http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/10089129/Ergonomic_keyboard_for_laptops

Including me in submission, that idea had 15 votes cast. This idea has had 18 votes. If it's a bad idea, fine, I would expect lots of down votes on it. But that fact that nobody is voting leaves it in a category of statistical insignifigance one way or another, or the equivalent of "why bother" posting an idea.

This leads to another question -- can ideastorm post the number of unique users who have actually been to the ideastorm site and actually *did* something (vote, comment, post idea) more than once in the past X weeks? 2 weeks sounds reasonable to me. Then comparing that to the number of unique visitors in the same time period (regardless of any action). Doing the same for a longer period, like 6 weeks, would be interesting, too, for comparison. Using the google chart API would be free & easy if the numbers were available.
aikiwolfie
Jun 14		 The problem you have there is interest. Or rather the lack of interest in your idea. What you'll find is that when people aren't particularly interested in an idea, but don't think it's bad. They will take a neutral stance and abstain from voting. So they aren't harming your chances but neither are they particularly interested in helping.

This idea is about how to improve IdeaStorm. These ideas are just as important as product ideas. IdeaStorm is one of our primary methods of telling Dell what we want in their products. So it has to work just right.
gerrygiese
Jun 14		 True enough, aikiwolfie, but there's still a difference between "neutral stance", which is either no recorded vote because don't care or breezed over the idea in passing, and plain ole "never saw it". The latter is the worst case that I think would be most bothersome to Dell and the community. But there does need to be some incentive to actually vote. If there were an incentive, then adding a "don't care" or "no opinion" button would be fine.
aikiwolfie
Jun 15		 Plain old never say I think is down to the nature of web forums. Everything is in a list. The list can only be so long before they take a new page.
 
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