Widgets in depth

Widgets are your fastest tool for surfacing a group's view and converging it. The User's Guide covers the mechanics; this page is about using them well in a live session.

The three widgets, and when to reach for each

• 📊 Poll (/poll) — a decision or a temperature check with defined options. Reach for it when you need a choice made.
• 🔤 Word cloud (/wordcloud, /cloud) — open-ended collection. Reach for it to open a topic: "one word for how the launch felt."
• 🗳️ Sortbox (/sortbox, /rank) — prioritisation. Reach for it to order a known set: rank the options, or dot-vote to spread limited votes across them.

A common session arc: word cloud to open → discussion → sortbox to prioritise → poll to decide → capture the decision as a finding.

Reveal policies are a facilitation lever

You choose when the aggregate becomes visible:

• After your own input — nobody sees the running tally until they've contributed. This is the default for polls and sortboxes, and it's deliberate: it kills anchoring, where early votes drag the rest. Use it whenever independent judgement matters.
• Live — everyone sees results update in real time. The default for word clouds, and good when you want momentum and build-on-each-other energy.

Pick the policy at setup time to match the effect you want.

Running one in the room

• A widget renders inline at the point you created it, so it's anchored to the moment in the conversation it belongs to.
• Open it full-size (from its card or the Assets rail) to display it while the group works — live updates flow to the big view too.
• Agents are participants: an agent can be asked to interpret a widget's result in the same chat.

Turning a result into knowledge

A widget result is only useful if it survives the session. When a poll settles or a ranking lands, capture it as a finding and promote it — otherwise the outcome scrolls away with the chat. See Resolutions & findings.

Coming soon

Generated image (/image) and chart (/chart) widgets are planned but not yet available.