Welcome!
Hi and Welcome to this digital education in Vocean and its platform.
We have divided this education into several chapters in order for you to get a good overview of the platform and its different parts and capabilities. In each chapter you will get the information in text and pictures. And don’t worry, all this information can always be accessed again for you to go back to if you want to repeat some of the parts!
First of all, Vocean is here for you to unleash the power of the many voices. This happens through maximum involvement of people and by creating opportunities to make more involved and informed decisions. This happens in our platform by collecting ideas, co-creating around them, building understanding and overviewing the results together and using reports as a basis for decision-making.
The result is empowered individuals who have the opportunity to face challenges together. Who can move forward and create new solutions together. The effects for your organization are measurable, noticeable and competitive.
The force of innovation lies in the power of the collective intelligence. In the power of the many voices. Let’s make them heard.
You can also watch this quick video before moving on, and once you feel done with a chapter, scroll to the bottom and click “Next chapter”.
Getting Around the Platform
This education assumes you already have access to your Vocean account. Which means you’ve gotten your invite from the admin of your company’s Vocean Space and you’ve logged in once. If you do not already have your account set up, it would be very beneficial if you would do that before continuing here. If you need help, please first check your inbox that you’ve gotten an invite. Otherwise contact your admin or the Vocean Customer Success Manager.
Once you are logged in to your account, you will see your page “Activities”. To navigate in Vocean, you have a navigation bar to the left, where you can switch tabs. To gain access to more pages, like “Members” & “Settings”, you will need Leader or Administrator privileges. This can be gained from your current Administrator.
When in the “Activities” tab, you can create activities from scratch or by using a template. What the activities are and how you create them will be explained in future sections.
If you look at the bottom of the navigation bar to the left you will see “Reports”. This is where you will find all of your previously created reports from the Activities. Click the arrow to see the list of reports. However, unless you’ve already tested the report functionallity, it will currently be empty. But once you’ve really started to get going in the platform this will be populated by the reports that really lets you make informed decisions.
Get to Know the Workboard
The Workboard is a must-know while using Vocean. It’s the space where you can build processes and co-create! It allows you to create fully modular processes that contain different Activities with different purposes.
For example you might want to co-create in an area of development in your company. Therefore, you might want to split up the area in different parts:
– The first question where you want the participants to send in their ideas
– The second challenge you have in this area
– And the final question that is connected to this area
– A prioritization of these ideas and solutions
– An evaluation or questionnaire of the process
The smart thing with the Workboard is that you can take an area that you want to involve people in, ask for input and split the area up for an easy structure, and still have all the parts connected to each other. The Workboard makes it easy and effective for creators (Leaders) to keep everything organized and make sure nothing gets lost, and it makes it easy for participants since they only need to click one link or scan one QR-code to get access to all of these parts.
To create a Workboard, you can navigate to your “Activities”-tab as we discussed in the previous chapter and press “Create activity”.
Choose “Workboard” and click “Next”. In the next step you get to choose a title for your Workboard, a description and a picture if you want. The title should be something short and that captures the main purpose of the Workboard. To see an example of this look at the next picture. Here we have a Workboard that contains several activities with the purpose of making meetings better. All of this can be changed after as well, just click the “pen”-icon in the top right of the next picture.
In the picture above you can see a picture of the Workboard. This is an example of a Workboard with the subject “Next Level Meetings”, and it has 3 questions which you can see in the navigation bar to the left, one prioritization and one evaluation. These are different activities, 3 Innovate activities, 1 Vote activity and 1 Explore activity. What these are will be explained in further chapters.
The only thing you need to know at this point is that you can build processes with how many activities you want and in which order you want. If we look at the same picture again, you can see a pencil above the activities. With that you can delete activities and change the order of them. Under all the activities in the list you can see “Add”, which is where you create new activities directly from the Workboard.
Vocean fully works on your mobile phone as well as your computer. However, some things might look differently. One example is the Workboards navigation bar, used for switching between different activities. To access this menu on mobile you press the purple button with a triangle, square and circle on. This button can be seen in the picture above.
The Innovate Activity
Now, let’s take a closer look on one of Vocean’s activities. Innovate is the tool where you can collect ideas, let other people upvote each others ideas and co-create. You get the benefit of letting hundreds (or more!) of people participate in the activity and contribute with their thoughts and ideas. In this activity everyone is anonymous, which makes it easier to give honest answers and ideas. Which is essential in business development. The Innovate activity gives you the possibility of using the collective intelligence to create development and growth, while building on inclusion and commitment.
First let’s look at the example Innovate in the previous Workboard, and afterwards how you can create them.
What you see in the picture above is an Innovate activity, with the title “Effective meetings”. This particular activity is included in a Workboard, which you can see by looking in the top left corner of the picture (It’s included in a Workboard called “Next Level Meetings”).
You can see that the activity is comprised of several cards, this is where you and your participants will interact with the activity and its results. The first one is called “Your Contributions”, which is where you and your participants will send in your ideas. “Everyone’s Contributions” is where you can see everyone else’s ideas, categorize and upvote them. The Matrix is where you can visualize where ideas lie in accordance to their properties. What these properties are will be explained later, but keep these in mind. We also see “Key Phrases”, which are some key phrases gathered from the ideas already sent in to the activity. You can always add more widgets by pressing “Add card” next to the last widget.
Let’s take a look at the list widget first. Get there by clicking “View” on the card.
The List Widget
Here we have a list of the ideas sent in to the activity. If we look to the right of the idea we can see a few columns. These are the properties of the idea that we briefly mentioned before. These properties can be set up while creating the activity, and will be different depending on the question. There are three different types of properties; sliders, text and rich text. These will be explained further while we are taking a look on creating an Innovate. These properties are set initially by the person sending in their idea, which means they have taken their own stance on their idea. By doing this you can better participate in a discussion of the ideas later. It also makes it easier for the people looking at the results to differentiate between the ideas. This feature is very useful and important!
You can also choose which of these properties to display in the list. Perhaps you want to highlight a specific property or you have a lot of them so you want to hide some of them. All properties can still be accessed by clicking on an idea.
All the way to the right we have the amount of likes the idea has. You and your participants can like ideas by going to this widget and pressing the thumbs up button next to an idea. The reason this is important is because you will, as a group, already give your opinions on what is most important even before a discussion. Then after this step is done you can have a group discussion, perhaps only on the top ideas if you have very many, and then edit ideas if needed. Edit the ideas by clicking on them and pressing the pen (Edit).
This step is also where you can let the participants “enrich” each others ideas. This means that they can edit each others ideas, and the properties. This is something you can change in the settings of an activity or during the creation of it. The possibility of people being able to edit each others ideas might only be appropriate for certain activities. However, it still is a powerful part of the co-creation process.
This step of upvoting ideas, discussing and modifying ideas is a very important step in the co-creation process.
One thing to note is that you can sort by property or amount of likes simply by clicking on the text for the property or on “Likes”.
Now let’s talk about the next step of what you should do when you’ve upvoted, discussed and edited the ideas. You can now select these ideas and take them further. If you direct your attention to the picture above, you can see the steps to activate “Selection mode”. This mode allows you to select the ideas you want and move, copy them or bring them to another activity. A common way of doing this is bringing your top ideas to a prioritization activity after this step of the co-creation process. If you want to create a completely new activity with these selected ideas, then simply select them and click “Add” in the left navigation bar in the Workboard. Just as described in the previous chapter when creating new activities.
The Matrix Widget
The next widget we are going to talk about is the Matrix. The main purpose of the Matrix is to visualize the ideas in comparison to their properties.
In the picture above is a visualization of all the ideas sent in to this activity. Now we can see that on the x-axis we have the property “Improvement”, which means the more to the right an idea lies the higher “Improvement” it has been rated as. On the y-axis we have “Difficulty”, and the size of the bubble represents the third property, which in this example is “Value for me”. If you hover your mouse on top of an idea you can see what it says. If you want to move an idea, simply drag and drop it somewhere else in the matrix. But this can only be done by the leader of the activity. Other participants cannot change other’s ideas, unless the setting for them to be able to do this is turned on. There needs to be “slider properties” on the ideas in order for the matrix widget to be useful.
We can also see a few ideas having an outline. These are ideas that have been selected in the “Selection mode”. Another useful thing about the Matrix is that you can zoom in on a cluster of ideas to more closely compare them to each other.
In the picture above we have zoomed in on a cluster of ideas by clicking and dragging. If we want to see the idea text above the circle you can press the settings icon, go to “Labels” and click “Enable labels”. This is shown in the next picture.
The Key Phrase Widget
The key phrase widget gives you an overview of the most common phrases among your participants’ ideas. You can also click a key phrase to see the connected ideas. For example, in the picture below, the word “Agenda” has been clicked.
Creating an Innovate
You can create activities in 2 different ways. The most common is when you already have a Workboard that you want to add an activity to. But you can also choose to create a stand-alone Innovate activity by creating it in the same place as when you created the Workboard. Start by either going to your Workboard and clicking “Add” or by creating it from the activities page. Choose Innovate.
Here you can give your activity a heading and a description. The more specific you are in your description, the better ideas will come in from your participants. The hard part is not sending in ideas, the hard part is asking the right questions. If you want an example of a heading and a description, you can look at the previous pictures.
You can also limit the amount of ideas to be sent in by each person, we recommend no limitations.
Next we come to the properties. You can choose how many properties you want. There are three types of properties with different purposes:
– Slider: let your participant drag on a slider from low to high. Useful for properties like “how effective the solution is”.
– Text: let you participants add some additional text. This can be something that all activities should have in common. like “responsible person” or “area of impact”
– Rich text: A text editor with more possibilities. Let your participants add more thorough explanations using different font styles, add tables or images.
How many properties and what they are are up to you and the challenge you have. For example it could be the three slider properties we had above, or “Effectiveness”, “Uniqueness” and “Cost”. It’s all up to your needs!
Important to add here, is that properties can also be added after the activity has been created. An example is that you might want your participants to send in ideas without properties at first, and then in the next stage you add properties and let your participants grade their ideas.
Next you can choose to add categories, which are used to categorize the ideas that are being sent in by your participants. You can make it mandatory to choose a category for your participants for each idea, allow multiple categories or allow your participants to create new categories while sending in ideas. You can also create your own categories by clicking “Add” under Manage categories.
When ideas have categories they can be filtered in the list widget and more easily sorted when having a lot of ideas.
The Prioritize Activity
The second activity we are going to look at is the Prioritize activity. To put it simply, Prioritize is used when you want to collect people’s input on a specific question by having your participants vote. How it works is that you, as the creator, ask a question to your participants, and then they get to vote or prioritize among a number of alternatives.
These alternatives can be set up by you in advance, or they could be ideas from another activity. This activity lets you see the results in real-time and allows many more people to give their input on a question. The results can be easily read and guide you in decision-making.
Let’s take a look at the results of a Prioritize activity.
In the previous chapter, we talked about “Selection mode” while in the list widget. There you could select ideas and bring them to another activity. And in the picture above we can see an example of this. We brought 5 ideas from the Innovate activity and created a new activity that we named “Prioritize”.
We can see that some of the ideas have already gotten a few votes! By using the activities together like this, you get a better understanding of how you think as a group, and everyone is involved in the process. And if you want to bring these ideas to another activity, it also has a selection mode just like Innovate. Then you can export both results to a report for a more comprehensive result, but don’t worry, we’ll discuss the reports later.
Creating a Prioritize
Let’s now talk about creating an activity like this. You create this activity in the same way as an Innovate-activity, by clicking “Add” in the Workboard, or from the “Activities”-tab. Choose Prioritize this time.
Just like in Innovate, you can give the activity a heading and a description. Up next is the voting type, and Vocean offers three different types:
– Select: This is where you give your participants a number of selections they can make from all of the voting alternatives. For example, if there are 5 voting options and you give your participants 2 votes, they can choose 2 options of the 5.
– Dot Voting: Here your participants get a number of votes that they can distribute among the voting options. If you choose 10 as the number of votes, the participants can for example give 5 points to Option A, 3 points to Option B and 2 points to Option C.
– Prioritize: This is where your participants can rank the options in relation to each other. Let’s say you have 5 voting options and you set everyone to have 3 number of votes. Then the participants can make a “top three” of these voting options.
Choose the voting type that fits the best for your specific question, and then choose the number of votes each participant gets. Different voting types are suitable for different amounts of votes. Experiment with this!
Before adding voting options, you get to choose if the participants should be able to see the results or not. We always recommend it to be set to “Yes”, since it provides instant feedback to your participants.
Next up are the voting options. Here you can add your own voting options by clicking “Add”, or you can import selected ideas from other activities. If you want to import ideas as voting options, make sure they are selected in the selection mode in the other activity. If you selected some ideas before creating the activity they should automatically pop up as voting options.
Once you are satisfied with the setup, click “Create activity”. If you want to change something before someone has participated, scroll down to the “Settings” and click “Manage”.
The Explore Activity
The final activity we are going to take a look at is the Explore activity. This is an activity where you can collect opinions from people. There are several instances where you would want to do this, for example as gathering feedback from the participants after an ideation process or as an employee survey, or why not explore your ecosystem for feedback?
The activity lets you ask several questions consecutively and lets you customize the question types depending on what you want to ask. Let’s take a look at an overview of a result from an Explore activity!
In the picture above we can see that we have five questions, each with different answer types. These are the different answer types you can choose between when creating an Explore activity:
-Slider: Capture a feeling by letting your participants use a slider.
–Yes/No: Sometimes a simple Yes/No question is best suited.
-Scale: Use a scale to let your participants answer what best suits them in the question. Useful for surveys.
-Text: A free flowing text answer that let’s your participants elaborate on a question.
-Multiple choice: Choose a number of alternatives to a question.
-Numerical value: This one is not shown in the picture above, but it lets people answer between two numbers.
If you want to expand the answers to a specific question, you can press “View” on the card that shows the question. Here you can make additional analysis, for example, correlations between questions. You can then see, for example, what the people who answered “Yes” in question 2 answered in question 5.
If you want to see the correlation between two questions, you first need to go to “View” on the question you want to see. In this example we go to question 5. Click “Filter”, then go to “Question correlations”, and choose which question you want to see the answers to. In this example we want to see how the people that answered “Yes” in question 2 answered in question 5. So we choose question 2 in the list and the answer option “Yes”. Now we can do our analysis and see if there are any correlations between the two!
Creating an Explore
Now, we are going to create an Explore activity. Just like the other activities, you can create an Explore activity by going to “Add” in the Workboard or creating it from the Activities-tab. This time you choose Explore.
Start by providing a heading and a description. Next you can choose if you want the results to be visible for the participants. Depending on what types of questions you ask, this could be switched off or on. If there are a lot of personal questions, perhaps this should be switched off. However, if it’s more of a general feedback it could be switched on!
Here you can also choose if you want to display the results only when a number of responses have been sent in. This is done under “Privacy”. If you set this to 5, then the participants can only see the results after 5 responses have been sent in.
Under “Questions” is where you add the questions. In the picture above three questions have already been added. And if you look at the top question, you can see the different answer types you can create. These are found in the drop down list.
If you want to use the “Scale”-answer style, you can find that under “Multiple choices”.
If you look at the picture above, you can see we have chosen “Multiple choices”. To activate the “Scale” answer type, you can check the box that says “Use scale”. If you press “Use common” you can quickly set up some common scale answer types, for example “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”.
However, you can also create your own by clicking “Add choice” (next to “Use common”). This is also how you add multiple choices, but then you do not check the box next to “Use scale”.
Just like the other activities, you can change the questions, title, or description before any responses have been sent in. Even if you have already pressed “Create activity”. The only requirement is that no responses have been sent in.
Invite People
One of Vocean’s best features is how easy it is for people to participate. This is accomplished through the Invite system that we are going to take a closer look at now.
Activities and whole Workboards can be accessed by your participants through QR-codes and links. If your participant has an account in the same space that you have, they can also have the activity saved to their account. However, the QR-codes and links are the quickest way for participants to access activities. These can, for example, be posted in chats, emails, presentations and even printed out.
First of all, when you want to invite people, you need to decide which activities they should have access to. For example, you can have a Workboard with several activities but you might only want the participants to have access to two specific activities. You, as the creator have full control over who can access which activities.
Now, let’s create a link and dive further into the features!
Links and QR-codes
First to clarify, links and QR-codes can be found at the same place and lead to the exact same place. So no matter if you click the link or the QR-code they will lead to the same place.
To create these you can navigate to the card that says “Manage Links” when you are inside a Workboard or an activity.
You can create links by clicking “Add”, and then choose what type of link you want it to be. The participation link is the type of link you want to create if you want people to participate in activities and contribute to them. The results link is for people to only look at the result of an activity and not contribute to them.
Let’s take a look at the Participation link first.
We can see in the picture above that a new link has been created, “Participant link 2”. If we look to the right on that link, we can see a check-box that has been ticked. And notice above that it says “Workboard”. This means that the link now contains access to only the Workboard but no activities yet. To choose which activities this link should give access to we need to go to the drop down list and choose one. The pictures below will showcase where this is done.
So what we have done now is gone to the list of all the activities that are present in the Workboard, shown as step 1 in the pictures. We then chose what activity to add to the link, for this first one we chose the activity called “Effective meetings”, shown as step 2 in the pictures. Then you will notice that a check-box, step 3 in the pictures, is empty. If we check this box, the activity “Effective meetings” will be added to the link.
This means that the link that we created now contains access to one of the three activities in the Workboard. So if a participant were to click the link or scan the QR-code now, they would only see this activity and be able to participate in this one.
Now, all that’s left is to check all the boxes for all the activities that you want to give access to. One thing that is very useful with Vocean’s links is that they can be updated in real-time without the need to send out a new link. Let’s go through an example to show this:
You start by giving access to one activity and then send the link to your participants. Once they’ve participated in the activity you want to give access to another activity. You then go to the links, and in the drop-down list you choose the new activity and check the box. Now in your participants device, the new activity automatically pops up. This also works if you want to remove access to an activity you have already gone through together with your participants.
Remember that if you create new activities in the Workboard you will need to update the link to give access to it!
To share this link, you can click the share-button like in the picture above. Then copy the link or access the QR-code. The QR-code can be downloaded to your computer, and then, for example, copied to a presentation or sent in a chat.
Add members to activities and Co-lead
We briefly mentioned that you can add members of the same Vocean space to an activity directly without using links or QR-codes. This also saves the activity to their “Activities”-tab in their own Vocean account.
This also opens up a new possibility of being several leaders in activities or Workboards. Co-leading activities are extremely useful when conducting processes like digital workshops. This helps you stay structured and focused. Co-leading an activity, or several activities in a Workboard, makes it possible for one of the leaders to act as a Facilitator and lead the meeting, while the other leader can, for example, sort out the most liked ideas and create a prioritization activity during the meeting. This makes for a very seamless experience and efficient meetings.
Both adding participants this way and adding additional leaders to your activities can be done by clicking “Manage” on the Manage Participants card.
Now, the next image contains a lot of information, so let’s try to break this down. Essentially, this page works similarly to the links. You have the same drop-down list to choose which of the activities to give access to. This is encircled at the top of the image.
You then see two columns, “Leader” and “Participant”. And then you see a list of all the people in the space as you. Then you can add these people to this activity as either a participant or a leader (if you want them to co-lead with you).
Remember to add these people to all activities you want them to have access to in the drop-down list.
The Report Tool
We are now getting to the end of this education in the Vocean platform. However, we have one of the most important features left. Let’s take a look at a picture that showcases how Vocean’s model can be used for different processes.
- This is essentially what the Vocean model boils down to. The first three steps of this process is covered by the Workboard and the three activities used together with effective meetings. Next up in this process is step 4, and that is to make a decision based on the results of all the activities. In order to be able to make smart decisions, Vocean has an automatically created report that compiles all of the data from the activities. And of course it’s fully editable!
Let’s take a closer look on this report.
After you’ve run all of the activities that you want with your participants, you can create a report by going to the card that says “Create Report” on the starting page of the Workboard OR on a single activity.
Now, when you’ve clicked “Create” you get this automatically generated report of the results of the activity. This might be fine for some purposes, but you might want to add different results or edit the text present. Then you can go in the top-right corner and click “Edit”.
In the picture below we are in the Edit-mode. We can give the report a new name by going to the top left encircled in the picture. To edit something in the report you can click any element to get an options bar to pop up. Depending on what type of element you’ve clicked on, different settings will become available.
What you will notice is that you can change all the text in the report, but you can’t edit the text from someone’s idea. You can also move elements of the report up and down in the report by clicking on the element and then pressing the up or down arrows in the options bar.
In the picture above we have the section from an Innovate activity. What we can see here is that all ideas have been listed as they are with no sorting. If we have a lot of ideas, this might not be reasonable for a report. So, what we can do is sort the ideas, by amount of likes for example, and choose to only display, say the top 15 ideas. What you can do instead is perhaps add the complete list at the end of the report like an appendix.
To do this, press the Innovate-part of of the report to get the options bar to pop up. Then click the cogs to access the settings. When in the settings, you can change the “Max number of items to show” to 15, in order for only 15 ideas to be displayed. Then you go to “Sort by” and change that to likes. Once saved, the result will be the top 15 most liked ideas being displayed.
Now, you might want to add more things to your report than the automatically created text and results. This can be done by scrolling to the bottom of the report and clicking “Add section”. Then you can add more text and results from other activities.
An example of when you might want to do this is if you’ve done the same activity with two different groups. You can add both of these activities to the same report and then add text to write down your own analysis of the differences between the two groups’ responses.
Finally, you can save this report in your Vocean account. It will be saved under “Report” in your navigation bar to the left, mentioned briefly in the first chapter. You might want to export this report. You can also download it as a .pdf or print it. After you’ve pressed “Save” in the top right corner, you can find “Print”. Click that button and another screen will pop up. Here you can choose to download it as a .pdf or print it directly.
