KU Polls Vision and Scope

Author : Thanawas Sirilertsathit

Revised : 20 Aug 2024

Background

KU staff and students often want to conduct polls or surveys within KU, or within an organization or group at KU. The polls or surveys provide input for making decisions, planning events, learning others' preferences, and feedback such an evaluation form for an event.

The most common poll or survey questions are multiple choice, where the respondent selects a choice from a list of choices. Other common formats are ratings such as 1 to 5, and short answer items.

There are existing applications for this on the Internet, such as Google Forms and SurveyMonkey, but they have limitations or unwanted features.

Google Forms provides many different poll formats, such as multiple choice, check box, linear scale (1-5), short answer, date selection, and choice grids. Some limitations are that it cannot set opening and closing date/times for poll questions, the poll creator must carefully set options to ensure that each user can submit only 1 response and be able to edit a prior response, and no way to restrict who can submit an answer. G-Suite customers can restrict responses to their organization, but no finer granularity.

SurveyMonkey has even poll question types similar to Google Forms and better formatting, but it is a commercial product with limits on free forms, including limit on the number of survey items and number of responses. The survey creator can limit the total number of responses, IP addresses of allow respondents, or create a password (one password used by everyone) to limit respondents, but no way to limit based on domain or individual identity.

Stakeholder and Their Interests

Stakeholder	Goal and Needs
Event Organizer	Easy way to get feedback from event
Student Groups	Query some preferences, opinions and results
Poll Respondents	Find and respond to a poll quickly, have identity protected, see the summary of how others respond
Event Participants	See how everyone responds to a poll about the event

Vision

For the KU community who want to conduct surveys and polls within the community, and who may wish to specify start/end dates for a survey or poll, our product is an easy to use web application that provides ability to submit a choice on poll items, and view or modify one's choice any time during a polling period.

Our product provides a simple web interface for creating polls, responding to polls, and allows everyone to see the results of a poll or survey.

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.

Alternative Solutions

There are other free and paid web-based applications for conducting polls and surveys. 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. Poll or survey questions have multiple choices where the respondant 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.
2. Authenticated users can submit a response to any poll question during the polling period.
3. A user can revisit a poll page to view his/her response, and can change it during the polling period.
4. No responses or change to a response are allowed after a poll's end date.
5. Poll questions are not visible before a poll's starting date.
6. 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.
7. Voting may be restricted to people with a KU login.
8. The application will be portable with a simple installation procedure.

Out of Scope

1. Limiting responses based on IP address or a list of allowed usernames or email addresses.
2. 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

Optional Features

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

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