The walkthrough
68.2 seconds. Captions are included in the film. Made with Nolan from an editable screenplay running in a real browser.
What we found
The board ranks ideas by votes, inside each forum separately.
The same request can be filed twice and decided two different ways.
Nothing on the board makes that visible.
This finding was synthesised from 380 harvested ideas across 7 forums, so there is no single requester to quote.
Key moments
- Place related requests from different forums next to one another.
- Keep each request's vote count and status unchanged.
- Show possible matches without automatically merging them.
What we concluded
Needs a different solution
Related requests can have separate vote counts and different statuses.
Showing them together preserves that context without pretending they are identical.
Why we reached that conclusion
This finding came from comparing the 380 ideas in our sample rather than from a request submitted to the board. We found several cases where closely related ideas appeared in different forums with separate vote counts and statuses.
Adding those votes together would overstate support for any one solution. For example, the dispute-flag requests received 531 and 1,259 votes, but one concerned sales invoices and the other concerned bills. That is 1,790 votes across two related requests, not 1,790 people endorsing a combined feature.
Identifying related requests also requires judgement. In an exploratory comparison of the 380 titles, one matching setup produced roughly 50 candidate pairs. After reviewing them, we judged about six to be close matches. Small changes to tokenisation and stop words changed which pairs appeared, so these figures describe our experiment rather than a reproducible benchmark.
Vote counts from different forums also sit in different contexts. The number of votes needed to reach the first page varied substantially across the seven forums in our sample, so a vote did not always have the same effect on visibility.
Our prototype groups related entries while preserving each request's original count and status. It does not add the votes together or automatically decide that two requests should become one.
Showing related requests together also makes different outcomes easier to see. It should not imply that similar requests are identical or that different statuses are necessarily inconsistent.