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The two questions we get alot at Collar Free are: How does your voting work? and Why did you choose this method?

Collar Free’s voting is a simple head to head competition model. You pick the shirt on the left or the right you like the best. This is considered a vote and assumes you picked the shirt you like the best scoring a win for that shirt. The shirts then compete against all the other designs in the system for 2 weeks collecting votes and hopefully wins. Then at the end of 2 weeks we pick a winner based on the public vote.

Why we picked this method is a little more detailed? Every rating and ranking system has it’s advantages and disadvantages. All are also subjective to the user and objectivity is almost impossible to obtain because everyone is different and as a result have different tastes.

Our goal is to combine simplicity with fun. So we chose a simple head to head system, formally called a comparison ranking system where designs rise and fall based on the simple win vs loss formula. From our research most systems use a 1 through 5, but this results in a large number of shirts with a cumulative 3. Either because people can’t decide or simply the fact that a 4 to one person is a 2 to another.

From our research we found that people can more commonly agree on the better of 2 items than they can on what is a 4 out of 5. For example two people are more likely to agree one design is better than another than they are to both rank a design a 4.

So far the system is working, but we plan on improving the algorithm by giving weight to users who pick the winner more often, shirts with the most comments, and shirts with wins vs higher designs vs lower designs where a win is expected similar to the ELO rating system in Chess.