Allow for an up or down vote

We recently rolled out the Ideas portal for our software platform's user group. While much of the functionality has been well received, I've gotten feedback multiple times that the inability to down vote an idea is a frustration. Without the counter to an upvote, we're unable to accurately gauge how receptive our customers are to an idea, which impacts our ability to prioritize ideas, and those customers who are more conflict-averse are unable to make their feelings known without emailing us privately, which defeats the point of the Ideas portal. Please please please reconsider this idea!

I feel this should be reconsidered, based on the new pinned idea functionality.

If you place an idea in front of 1,000 people traversing a portal, with the intention of gathering meaningful feedback, people who do not see value in an idea are unlikely to use the call to action to comment, and will instead look for value elsewhere. The people who do see value will immediately vote. By placing ideas in this way (and considering the fact that this is an idea that a PM has specifically chosen for a meaningful yes/no decision), it skews the results to the positive.

Adding a 'Not Interested' will allow the PM to gauge the response based on the total amount of responses, not just those that approve of the idea. The pinned functionality brings this to the extreme - imagine walking a thousand people through a room with a single paragraph to read and nothing but a 'Like' button. In this scenario, those that walk out without pressing like would be 'Not interested', and therefore 310 likes would be 31% positive, 69% neutral. why is this data not captured! 310 likes on an idea does not give any value if the total sample size is unknown - if 310 likes came from the same scenario but with a million people, it is probably a terrible idea, but has no difference in the current system!

Either a negative/Neutral button should added or ideally a MoSCoW system or similar for example APP-I-991 or APP-I-2593, which could both scale user feedback.

I had a customer of our request this for our idea board which is the Aha suggestion box. I think this should be reconsidered as well. If we only have he option for customers to upvote an idea, we will never be able to see or hear other customers that disagree that it's a good idea. It makes the idea board less about getting true feedback from all customers and just a board of possible future features. Allowing customers to downvote what they think is a terrible idea gives Product a better idea of the whole picture and not just the picture of the customers that want this idea.

This idea for example only has upvotes on it. Wouldn't it be useful to see how many customers disagree with this idea altogether?

Please reconsider, we could use this feature now espeically with all the expanded workspace(s).

I'm not sure that I understand the position of Admin on this topic. The whole point of the ideas incubator is to gather feedback from your customers to improve the usability of your product. You personally don't feel that this is a capability that should be included, but many of actually have a difference of opinion. Presence of only positive votes certainly gives you feedback...but it doesn't account for customer who don't agree with the suggested enhancement. In the case you noted (100 up votes, 60 down votes) if all we see is 100 positive votes we would say this is important and would mote to implement. If I saw 60 downvotes that would tell me that I need to dig in further and do additional research. I feel by only seeing the positive votes product managers risk implementing items that later might have to be pulled out or modified because of backlash. Seeing both sides up front allows the research to be done before implementation. Additionally - your competitors allow this capability. We transitioned from a different tool and our customers are accustomed to this...now we've taken away a feature they see as valuable. Aha has been great in a number of areas but your inflexibility in this area is disappointing. Perhaps you should have a product manager do customer validation on this idea instead of relying on the opinion of one admin who doesn't like or doesn't understand this capability.

 If we had Yes/No votes, then I know when a user has voted and didn't just ignore the idea.

Think this is short-sighted and should be an option for admins. A broad distribution of a ;lot of votes, means the idea is likely controversial and people are opinionated about it. That is useful information, and let's you know if an idea would have a negative impact on your user base.

I was just about to add this to the ideas board.   This feature would be nice to enable.

I know you have already said you will not implement but other Ideas functionality providers provide this option.  Maybe you would consider adding the functionality but enabling the admin to enable/disable it so your customers can chose what works best for them?  We had this functionality when we previously hosted Ideas in Salesforce.com and found it valuable.

This has 35 votes now, which is fairly high in this portal. Maybe it's a bad idea, like you say, but without a set of specific downvotes, all we can see is the high number of positive responses. What i'm trying to say is the number of votes this idea has srt of invalidates the response.

Customer feedback can be complicated and this idea would help with understanding it better.  For my customer base, we have the small mom-and-pop shops and the large enterprises.  Some ideas are beneficial for one and not the other, so without a clear indication on who would benefit or be harmed from it, we spend more time doing customer research.

This wouldn't be the deciding factor on prioritization, but would be greatly helpful on deciding where to start.

Here's another great idea around voting. https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-2593.  If this is ever implemented, we'll likely modify it to get the data we need.

If the idea gets 100 votes and 60 downvotes, then the net votes is 40, which means that if there is idea with 100 votes and 20 downvotes, the latter idea has 80 net votes and is better. This is basically a key principle for NPS calculation.

Our users would most certainly value this as a feature(and have asked us to provide it) 
their argument is that not all customer feedback should be constrained to either for or abstain (potentially implying indifference).

consider the ludicrous example:
someone suggest delete the ideas portal .....
this may get voted up by a group (that want to move to a competitor product) , but those that rely on it have no means to say 'no' this would kill my productivity, other than via a comment... and who want to have to always run sentiment analysis over comments to add into product planning, when would be nice to quicky be able to guage from the product that theer is resistance

This is a great idea!

Potentially this could be optional for your portal. You could have the legacy voting or allow Up/down votes.