At Atlassian, we often do an exercise called The $10 Game when we're discussing prioritization. Each person gets 10 (imaginary) dollars that they allocate among the various items to be prioritized. The purpose isn't to tally up the dollars and declare a winner, but rather to get a read on different opinions and how strongly they're held. 

We want to introduce this practice into Jira Product Discovery, and the first step is to create a new type of field that collects votes and comments. 

As I started to create mockups, I found myself wondering what sensible default settings might be: should we hide the vote totals so people aren't influenced by peers, or should we be transparent? 

I created a quick visual of each option and posted a new "Feature Feedback Friday" discussion on our community of alpha users, asking what they thought they would use most often. They really surprised me - almost everyone said they'd be more likely to use a feature that was transparent, and showed the vote totals to all users. 

I'm glad I asked for a little input; it gave me more confidence in choosing transparency as the default.