Eval Recap: Product 95/96 & Big Changes Afoot

Will do better next time…

Needs to be a way to limit the band wagon effect. Spiking votes for products that certain people have commented on. IMHO people are looking at making profit not the most incredible product. So they want to vote for the idea that is going to win but the quickest and easiest way to win. Maybe we should only show the comments and not who they are from so all comments hold the same weight and not that a past winner wrote them. This will encourage more people who are shy about their knowledge to participate with the freedom of anonymity. This would cut down on the handful of people steering the votes.

I might repeat 1001st time but killing TOP5 is the first priority to make the process meaningful.

Listening to your customers, stakeholders and employees and acting on what you hear shows great leadership. Kudos the team!

Another Great Recap… plus high praise on bringing Process change. Excellent.

1. Make us rank our votes. More reflective of the true support an idea has and a more equitable basis for Influence distribution. Have the “value” of votes tail off the later in the week it gets to minimize the “just for a bit of Influence” votes of perceived favorites.
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2. Let us follow Quirks we respect so that we are able to capitalize on the time they invest and the discernment they exhibit. (What happen to the Badge program?) Allow us to Ping people with submission numbers if they allow such notifications, or at least let us show our votes so that anyone viewing a Member profile can see which ideas are being supported versus commented on alone.
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3. Make a preliminary cut so that the sheer volume of entries is halved and the amount of focus on the remaining ideas doubled. At this stage gray out submissions that have no chance of winning, effectively eliminating them for the “contest” portion of the round, but keep the Comments section live. A brief explanation of why it didn’t make the cut is more than people get now, and gives them the basis for refinement. Perhaps use a code system with such distinctions as Off Brand (OB); Patent Protected (PP); Cost Prohibitive (CP); Not Profitable (NP); Not Feasible (DUMB); Just A Thing (JAT); We Don’t Make Office Supplies (JJ); Market Saturated (MS); Market Too Small (MTS); Etcetera, Etcetera (ETC)

Never ever EVER ever EVER EVER times a million do a product that you are not passionate about. In my experience it never works out.

People are Lemming the votes! Following the crowd trying to earn Influence by picking the winner and not caring if it is the best product idea. The most popular and most comment searches gotta go and then people will be forced to vote for what they like not vote for what they know or think is going to win based on those search function results…….
The only search that should be there is sort by newest or random…
And now with this Digits fiasco perhaps keeping everything private by quirky might be the best and you decide which products to select and when you make them public you got the one year to file clock to file for a patent once it becomes public…..and those will be the products we will work on….

Please consider the top 10% and only publish those that you would make and do some research please. Take out the one’s with no hope credit them back (or credit for a quirky product) and do the upfront work for you and us! Thanks for listening. Sorting by category would be a big help! Meaning we all have to pick a category, let us go into each category and vote for like products. You may even pick a product per category, and just say “we will pick the product we are passionate about” in each category, or nothing at all.

Get rid of top 5, makes not sense to have it…

What Ken said. Which is why I would want to link with someone like Ken to help me evaluate. He’s one of several who’s opinion consistently either mirrors mine, or is considered enough to sway me. I would rather have a tool with select people (anonymously) followed than being contacted via email to consider at something. I think in general more anonymity would help in voting, because we do influence each other.

I’m pretty sure you already do weigh voting based on the timeline. I’m not crazy about that because, I participate according to my schedule. I wouldn’t want to be penalized for that. However, if you clearly state how voting influence changes over time, it wouldn’t be as bad. I’d know when I need to lock in a vote for full influence credit.

I think Ken had a great idea about how to handle submissions that didn’t make the first cut-by greying them out. People could still offer advice for resubmissions, w/o wasting anyones time. If voting is working, I don’t see a need to kill the Top 5 plus Wildcard(s). I’m not sure what Imants’ alternative to that is. Essentially we are electing the best ideas, so it makes sense to me that the Top 5 are isolated. Plus, I think we are gaining insight from your eval videos being posted about the Top 5 contenders.

My opinion, the solution is two fold; the QS should have more front-end influence pre-DMV selection and the way the QC brings ideas to the attention of the QS should be improved. Important questions remain: How do you get Votes/Community-Scores and DMV results to mach up if you keep the current voting schema? If the QS has more front-end influence, how do you insure the QC will still have a satisfying amount of ideation selection influence? I don’t think the current way of picking the top 5 ideas (+ wild card/s) is steered by the most DMV viable ideas. Even if something should be made and would sell a metric shit-ton, it may be off brand or implausible for Quirky, as one company, to make. That is obviously a problem. Additionally, if you think the cooling brief has a good DMV viable idea – Why don’t you find it, identify why it didn’t surface, inform us so we can be informed voters, etc. … and maybe make it?

Also, I propose we should refer to quirky influence linked to money as “influen$e” and regular influence as just “influence”… so it’s not confusing. As in the above post, I meant just regular “influence” and not influen$e.

I think we are all agreeing on what the problem is, throw away votes going to most popular or most comments at the end of the week in hopes to grab even a little influen$e as @Steven suggests. So what’s the break down if you use 1 vote on the product you really believe in or 15 on the MOST’s. I try to use as few votes as possible I restrict myself to 5 but usually use no more than 3. But hey if I can use 30 votes to spread around to whatever maybe I’m missing out on influen$e. I still don’t fully understand the influence breakdown and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m more of an audio/visual learn so how about a video on maximizing your influence. Thanks for all you guys are doing it’s rare that there is so much willingness to change and morph into something that I grow more proud of each day.

Please let the community vote up or down in one phase to cull out nonviable ideas (in our opinion and Quirkys). The second round would allow the community to offer more detailed feedback on the more viable problems and solutions

I appreciate the time you spent attempting to prototype my cooling funnel (and stroking my ego about the design). I’d like to offer my views on what I see as the problem with the current voting scheme.

1) How many of your winning ideas have the most comments? The problem is motivation. You can’t pay people based on getting their vote on the “winning” idea. When you do that, and people notice that one idea has more comments they will vote for the highest commented every time. Just take away the monetary incentive and votes will become more organic. I guarantee you people are not voting authentically because I find myself doing it. Its a growing open secret that if you want ‘influence’ every time, you just have to vote for the one with the most comments. It is well studied that people who are offered money for something they would otherwise do for free act more conservatively and reject creative solutions. Check out “Drive” by Daniel Pink for a take on this effect.

2) You need to provide us with the tools that you use to evaluate these ideas. Most of the issues that you raised are not on the minds of the evaluators. Give us an on site tool that allows us to use our “own mini dmv’s.” We don’t really know what that means because it doesn’t explain or describe it anywhere on the site.

3)Voting scale issues: By my guesstimate the winning idea gets between 3 and 5 hundred votes. It is easy to leverage friend networks and voting blocks to get around 100 votes. Counter-intuitively I think you would do well to make it harder to vote on things. Require more thought with a built in dmv.

Just my ideas, but I really think the issue is people voting on what they think will win rather than what they like. P.S. it’s pronounced McCLOUD.

Not cool. This was fraud and misrepresentation. You can entice a community this way.

@Seth: I think fraud is way too harsh. We are fortunate Quirky even exists. It’s not their fault that the top 6 that surfaced didn’t meet the necessary requisites. Though, they did say they were pretty sure that with all the ideas that were submitted there should at least be one worth pursuing.

@ Quirky: I do think you owe it to the company and the community to find those ideas (or that idea) that should have surfaced, and Maybe (capital M) even make one. I have some ideas (like it seems most people do) why the “best” 5 (6, in this case) ideas weren’t the “top” 6 ideas. However, this Cooling Round would be a great case example with empirical evidence to support the various hypotheses that are accurate or inaccurate. The best 6 not surfacing to the top 6 reviewed is a symptom of a problem. PLEASE, figure out the problem so you don’t just through pills at a symptom. I think you can tell that people are, and have been, frustrated. Also, I don’t think a statistician is going to provide any more than a piece (or maybe many pieces) to this puzzle. I think you need a psychologist too.