Dot-Voting

The Design Thinking ideation process often generates many, wide-ranging ideas. To harvest that brainstorm and ensure that ideas do not just sit there on the board, they need to be grouped and filtered.

Dot-Voting is a great group or individual tool to select the most impactful ideas to carry forward by preserving the breadth of solutions and not settling for the safe choice. In short, it is a simple tool to democratically prioritize items or make decisions in a group.

Participants are each given a set number of colored dot stickers, representing different selection criteria. With this in mind you do not vote for your favorite ideas, but for the ones that fulfill the identified criteria. Such as most rational, resonant or radical. The ideas with the most dots are taken forward for the final decision, e.g. in a group discussion. You can, but you don't have to continue with the idea which got the most votes. Remember the "leftover" ideas, as they might be useful inspiration in the prototyping phase or when pivoting.