KU Polls Vision and Scope

Author: Phantawat
Revised: 19 Aug 2024

Background

KU staff and students frequently need to conduct polls or surveys within the KU community or specific organizations and groups. These surveys gather valuable input for decision-making, event planning, understanding preferences, and collecting feedback, such as evaluating an event.

Common poll formats include multiple choice, rating scales (e.g., 1 to 5), and short answer questions. While there are existing online tools like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey, they come with limitations or unnecessary features.

Google Forms offers various poll formats but lacks functionality like setting specific opening and closing dates/times for polls and restricting responses to a single submission per user without careful configuration. SurveyMonkey provides more robust formatting and features but imposes limitations on free accounts and lacks fine-grained response control.

Stakeholders and Their Interests

Stakeholder	Goal or Needs
Event Organizer	Easy way to get custom user feedback on an event.
Student Groups	Query members' preferences or opinions, see ongoing results.
Poll Respondent	Find and respond to a poll quickly, have my identity protected, see a summary of how others have responded.
Event Participant	See how everyone responds to a poll about the event.

Vision

For the KU community members who wish to conduct targeted surveys and polls, our product, KU Polls, will be a user-friendly web application that facilitates easy poll creation, response collection, and result visualization. It will support the setting of optional start and end dates for each poll, allowing respondents to submit or modify their choices during the active polling period.

Our platform will offer a simple and intuitive interface for both creating and participating in polls, with transparent access to poll results for all authorized users.

Additional Detail

Each poll or survey question may have optional start and end dates. Polls will remain invisible before their start date, and responses will be locked after the end date, though the poll results can still be viewed.

Alternative Solutions

There are other free and paid web-based applications for conducting polls and surveys as described in the Background. Two such products are:

• Google Forms - has several types of survey items including multiple choice, matrix, short answer, and free-form long answer. The form owner can manually enable/disable collecting responses and limit the scope to a Google organization (only for G-Suite customers), but cannot specify start/end dates.

• Survey Monkey - has several types of survey items and limit poll dates, but free version has many limitations.

Main Features

1. Flexible Polling Periods: Each poll question can have unique start and end dates, or remain open indefinitely.
2. Authenticated Responses: Users can submit responses during the active polling period and revisit to modify their answers if necessary.
3. Response Locking: No further changes are allowed after a poll’s end date.
4. Visibility Control: Poll questions are hidden before their start date and remain viewable afterward.
5. Results Accessibility: Poll results are accessible to all after the start date, but only authenticated users can participate.
6. KU Login Integration: Voting may be restricted to those with KU credentials.
7. Portability: The application will be easily portable with a straightforward installation process.

Optional Features For Staged Release

These features will not be in the initial release, but may be added to future releases.

1. Expanded Poll Creation: Authorized users can create polls with multiple formats and optional polling periods.
2. Additional Poll Formats: Future versions may include formats like linear scales, multiple responses, or short answers.
3. OAuth Integration: Implementing OAuth as an alternative authentication method.

Features Not To Be Implemented

1. IP-based or Username-specific Response Limiting: Responses will not be limited by IP address or specific usernames/email addresses.
2. Custom User Interface for User Management: The system will rely on existing frameworks for adding users through an admin interface or data import functions.

References

1. Advantis has good suggestions on creating a vision.