In summary:
Create a form or table with multiple criteria
Vote with dots for a good enough and quick result
Why you need to evaluate ideas
As service designers, there are times when you need to come up with new ideas for a project, service, or product. You then need to quickly evaluate which ideas are the most promising for prototyping and testing with users or other stakeholders.
Since time is limited, you need to narrow down the number of ideas before you get to the prototyping stage. Here are a few ideas on how to do that:
Scoring
Create a form or table with multiple criteria (for example, feasibility, impact for users, impact on the business, impact on the world, etc.) and score all the ideas.
You can do this alone, as a team, or even include those affected by those ideas in the scoring process.
You can use survey tools like Surveymonkey, Jotform, or Typeform to do this. Just make sure to use a “Likert-scale”
Scoring isn't my favorite way of doing it, as then the conversation often get heated about the scoring system instead of being about the ideas.
Dot voting
Keep it simple. Just give three dots to everyone and ask them to put the dots on the most promising ideas.
People can either put all three dots on the same idea if they think it's the best, or they can split their dots among different ideas.
Again, you can do this alone with the team or include the people who will be affected by those ideas.
You can use an app like Miro, where a sticky note represents each idea, and then people can add stickers to vote (or use the voting feature). You can also do it offline with sticky notes, stickers or pens.
How much information do people need to vote?
If the people who vote or rate the ideas are also involved in coming up with the ideas, they will need some context to be able to rate them. A simple sketch or quick video where you explain the idea can be very helpful.
Real-life example
Here's a real-life example of how I did this using a Typeform survey, recorded videos, and a sketch made on Miro on the iPad. People then voted by selecting the number of hearts they gave each idea.
For those who don’t need much detail, a short text description, the image, and the title are enough. For those who wanted more detail, they could watch a two-minute video where I described the idea.