BallotShare: An exploration of the design space for digital voting in the workplace

•Proposed a framework that explores the design space of e-voting for participation.•Developed a system to explore the features that could drive participation.•The system was deployed for five weeks in a workplace environment.•Quantitative and qualitative data were gather about the use of the system.•Drivers and limitations of participation in the voting process were identified. Digital voting is used to support group decision-making in a variety of contexts ranging from politics to mundane everyday collaboration, and the rise in popularity of digital voting has provided an opportunity to re-envision voting as a social tool that better serves democracy. A key design goal for any group decision-making system is the promotion of participation, yet there is little research that explores how the features of digital voting systems themselves can be shaped to configure participation appropriately. In this paper we propose a framework that explores the design space of digital voting from the perspective of participation. We ground our discussion in the design of a social media polling tool called BallotShare; a first instantiation of our proposed framework designed to facilitate the study of decision-making practices in a workplace environment. Across five weeks, participants created and took part in non-standard polls relating to events and other spontaneous group decisions. Following interviews with participants we identified significant drivers and limitations of individual and collective participation in the voting process: social visibility, social inclusion, commitment and delegation, accountability, influence and privacy.