Once you've set up evaluation for a board, you may come across Viima score, either on your board or in the evaluation dashboard in the admin portal. Here we'll explain what it is and what it's used for.
In essence, Viima score represents how good an idea is considered to be. It is a very useful tool for quickly comparing a large number of ideas in order to try to prioritize them.
NOTE: Sometimes you might come across the term "Normalized score". This is technically slightly different than Viima score but ultimately represents the same idea. For more details, please read the description below.
What is Viima score?
In a nutshell, Viima score is the average of normalized evaluations from all the metrics of an idea.
What this means is that the average of all evaluation results for all the metrics of an idea, which may vary quite a lot, are converted into a 0-100 scale. This includes both evaluations that are visible to everyone, as well as "admin only" evaluations. After this conversion is done, the average of all those values is calculated and given as a single score, the Viima score.
If you have defined that a lower value is better in the metric settings, the scale will be flipped prior to normalization in order to make the charts and averages comprehensible.
You can also set a "weight" for each metric, which indicates how many times the metric is taken into account when calculating the Viima score. By default, the weight is set to 1. You can set a metric's weight to 0 if you don't want the metric to affect Viima score at all, or alternatively set a higher value than 1 to increase the metric's importance on the Viima score.
Note, that if an idea has ratings only in metrics that have a weight of 0, the Viima score will be 0 as well.
The process of calculating a Viima score is thus as follows:
Flip scales of metrics that use the "lower value is better" setting
Normalize the given evaluations on a scale of 1-100
Calculate the average of the normalized values for each metric
Calculate the average of the metric averages (while taking metrics' weights into account) to form the final Viima score for the idea
Example 1
An idea has three metrics with weight = 1 and the following evaluations:
10 users who have voted an average of 4 on a 0-5 scale
20 users who have voted an average of 26 on a 0-50 scale
15 users who have voted an average of 12 on a 0-20 scale
The Viima score would be determined as follows:
The converted average of the first metric: ((4/5) * 100) = 80
The converted average of the second metric: ((26/50) * 100) = 52
The converted average of the third metric: ((12/20) * 100) = 60
The average of all three metrics: ((80 + 52 + 60) / 3) = 64
Viima score: 64
Example 2
An idea has two metrics with different weights and the following evaluations:
50 users who have voted an average of 7 on a 1-10 scale (metric weight = 1)
3 admins who have voted an average of 3 on a 1-10 scale (metric weight = 2)
The Viima score would be determined as follows:
The converted average of the first metric: ((6/9) * 100) = 66
The converted average of the second metric: ((2/9) * 100) = 22.22
The average of both metrics while taking weight into account: ((1*66 + 2*22.22) / (1 + 2)) = 36,81
Viima score: 37
Example 3
An idea has three metrics with different weights and the following evaluations:
50 users who have voted an average of 25 on a 0-50 scale (metric weight = 1)
50 users who have voted an average of 40 on a 1-50 "A lower value is better" scale (metric weight = 1)
50 users who have voted an average of 90 on a 1-100 scale (metric weight = 0)
The Viima score would be determined as follows:
The converted average of the first metric: ((25/50) * 100) = 50
The converted inverse average of the second metric: (((49 - 39) / 49) * 100) = 20.04
The converted average of the third metric: ((89/99) * 100) = 89.90
The average of all metrics: ((1*50 + 1*20.04 + 0*89.90) / (1 + 1 + 0)) = 35.02
Viima score: 35
What is Viima score used for?
Instead of comparing a varying number of evaluations from different scales, Viima score provides a good sense of an idea's overall evaluation results on a unified scale that is easier to analyze. The better the Viima score, the better an idea has succeeded in all the given evaluation metrics. This, however, doesn't necessarily mean that it is a better idea in real life as it depends on the quality of the data provided by the people evaluating the idea, as well as the metrics chosen.
For more information on idea evaluation in general, please see this blog post.
If you wish to review results from individual metrics, you can still do so from the evaluation dashboard in the admin portal of your board.
Our evaluation dashboard can be used for managing and exporting all idea evaluation-related statistics if you wish to analyze or visualize the data in more detail.