Facilitating a Ranking Activity in Workshop

What is the Ranking activity?

Ranking is a workshop activity that allow your audience to compare a list of items with each other and arrange them in order of preference. Based on the aggregated votes of the audience, you can move forward with the items that are most preferred, and deprioritize those items that are least preferred.

Why is it useful?

This activity type is highly effective as it requires the participant to intentionally choose which items they prefer (rather than “sit on the fence”), so you can fully understand the participant’s real-world preferences.

How do you setup a Ranking Activity?

You can get quickly started up by entering required information for the activity. Here's the steps on getting started:

1. Click Add Activity and select Ranking activity.
2. Enter the Activity Title. We recommend putting some instructional text about for the activity that will be displayed to the participants.
3. Enter the Answer Choices. These will be the items that the participants will be asked to rank in order.

How do you facilitate a Ranking Activity?

1. Click on the Ranking Activity
2. Click the Participant Display button to start the voting for participants

On the Activity Canvas, the votes will be displayed for each of the answer choices. You'll be able to see which items have the highest ranking scores. Click on the Star ☆ icon to highlight that specific idea.

3. Click the Presentation Display button to present the results. Once votes have been submitted by participants, you'll see the bar appear under each idea which indicates the aggregated vote score for that item across all participants' votes.

How is a Ranking Activity scored?

Every time the participant submits a response, each answer choice will receive a “ranking score”. The individual “ranking score” is the 1 divided by the rank submitted by the participant

• E.g. The #1 ranked idea will receive a score of 1/1 = 1.00
• E.g. The #10 ranked idea will receive a score of 1/10 = 0.10

The ranking score for an idea that is calculated for the Presentation Display is simply the sum of all ranking scores submitted by the participants for that answer choice.

How do you participate in a Ranking Activity?

Once the facilitator has started voting, you'll be presented with a list of items to rank. The participant can drag the items to re-order the list, and then submit the votes.

What are best practices?

• Send brainstorm ideas to the activity. Existing brainstorm ideas can be easily sent to the Ranking activity. You can do this by selecting the brainstorm ideas and clicking "Send to Vote" from any brainstorm activity.

You can then send those ideas to a new or existing voting activity. Please note that the Ranking activity supports up to 15 ideas in total, so you'll need to make sure that you only send the right amount of ideas to that activity.

• Limit your ranking options. We recommend 5-7 ideas to be ranked in order to prevent "survey fatigue".
• Consider separate categories of ranking, rather than 1 huge list.
• Group together items that are similar. Avoid asking participants to order items that are highly similar as it puts additional cognitive load on the participant to think about these choices. If possible, group similar items together as one ranking option.
• View the vote scores to see the popularity of each item. Showing the vote scores allows you to see the aggregated preference of each item. This may indicate consensus or alignment on a particular set of ideas.