Vision and Scope - TAGCH/ku-polls GitHub Wiki

Background

In the KU community, staff and students frequently need to create and manage polls or surveys for various purposes, such as gathering input for decision-making, event planning, and collecting feedback. Common question formats include multiple choice, ratings (e.g., 1 to 5), and short answers.

While existing online tools like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey are available, they have significant limitations. Google Forms, for instance, offers various question types but lacks features such as setting specific opening and closing dates for responses, restricting access to specific users, and ensuring that each participant can only submit one response. SurveyMonkey, while offering better formatting options, has restrictions on its free version, including limits on the number of questions and responses, and lacks fine control over respondent identity and access.

To address these shortcomings, we aim to develop a tailored solution for the KU community, focusing on ease of use, flexibility, and security in conducting polls and surveys.

Stakeholders and Their Interests

Stakeholder	Goal or Needs
Event Organizer	Need a simple way to get feedback from attendees and plan future events.
Student Groups	Want an easy tool to ask members for their opinions and see the results as they come in.
Poll Respondant	Look for a quick and secure way to take part in polls, with their privacy protected and results shared.
Event Participant	Interested in seeing how others responded to event-related polls.
KU Administration	Seeks reliable data from polls and surveys to guide decision-making and improve university services.
Faculty Members	Need a way to gather student feedback on courses, teaching methods, or departmental decisions.
IT Support Team	Interested in maintaining a secure and easy-to-use platform that integrates well with existing systems.
Research Groups	Require a tool to conduct surveys for research purposes, gathering data from specific participant groups.

Vision

Our goal is to create an easy-to-use web application specifically for the KU community, allowing staff and students to conduct surveys and polls. This tool will enable users to set start and end dates for polls, submit responses, and view or change their answers during the polling period. It will also provide a simple way to create polls, participate in them, and see the results.

Our product will make it easy for everyone in the KU community to create and respond to polls, with all responses visible once the poll is open. People will be able to see how others have responded, while only authorized users will be allowed to vote.

The application will be designed for easy installation and use, making it a reliable tool for gathering opinions and feedback within the KU community.

Additional Detail

The opening and closing dates for each poll/survey question are optional.
A question is not visible to web visitors before the opening date, and responding or modifying an existing response is not allowed after the closing date, but the poll/survey and results can be viewed after the closing date.
Users will have the option to view the poll results in the form of graphs, making it easier to understand the data visually.

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 limits poll dates, but the free version has many limitations.
Lucky Orange - provides real-time feedback and integrates with user behavior tools, but lacks advanced survey customization, has fewer question types, and requires a paid plan.
Hotjar - allows survey creation via chatbot and integrates with user behavior tools, but requires a license for full features.

Main Features

Poll or survey questions have multiple choices where the respondent chooses one. Each poll question can have its own specific start and end date (the polling period). If not specified, then a poll remains open indefinitely.
Authenticated users can submit a response to any poll question during the polling period.
A user can revisit a poll page to view his/her response, and can change it during the polling period.
No responses or changes to a response are allowed after a poll's end date.
Poll questions are not visible before a poll's starting date.
Anyone can view the results of a poll question at any time after the starting date, but only authorized users can vote for a poll.
Voting may be restricted to people with KU login.
The application will be portable with a simple installation procedure.

Optional Features For Staged Release

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

Any authorized person can create poll or survey questions with multiple choices and a specified start and end date (the polling period). These dates are optional; if not specified, then a poll remains open indefinitely.
Other poll item formats, such as linear scale (e.g., 1–5), ability to select multiple responses, or short answer poll questions.
Use OAuth for authentication as an alternative to username and password.

Features Not To Be Implemented

Limiting responses based on IP address or a list of allowed usernames or email addresses.
User interface for adding "users" with username and password. The framework provides two mechanisms for this:
- admin interface to add users and passwords
- a data import function that can import user data from a JSON or CSV file
Create surveys by specifying requirements to a chatbot that will handle the setup.

References

Advantis has good suggestions on creating a vision.
Compete Now has good suggestions on how polls work on websites.