The pen is mightier… than the pencil.
Back when, what feels like a short time ago, but is actually half my lifetime, I was an under-graduate student in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering at Swansea University. Yes, me. I absolutely loved my time there and, like most, learnt much more about myself than my chosen subject.
Amidst my envy for arts students and their 8 hours of lectures a week; the early starts, as a dozen of us squeezed into a minibus, to head to Dow Corning for our industrial placements and the countless escapades of derring do in the bars and clubs of that pretty, shitty city; I do still recall some of the lessons I was taught in the Faraday Building.
The one I want to refer to today was taught to me by the inestimably nice Professor Tony Knights, with his wheezy chest and his crumbs in his beard, and the clean-cut, prim and proper, almost reptilian, Professor Tony Wardle.
In our first year we got to partake in countless hands on experiments in ‘the lab’… a vast space, jammed full of intricate glassware… to do experiments! Steepling spirals, compact condensers, abundant bunsen burners. All crammed in, cheek to jowl; a pretty daunting experience for a kid that had attended a Comprehensive School with scant budget for such extravagances.
Anyway, with each lab lesson, we got given our instructions and then had to weigh out, decant, distill, boil, freeze and whatever else to progress our knowledge. All along, crucially, we’d be taking measurements: temperatures, flow-rates, pressures and from these calculating viscosities, densities, you name it.
Trouble was, part of the exercise was to neatly draw the equipment you used in your notepad too. That meant a pencil (and a ruler and a compass; remember them!). But, if you then went on to use that pencil to record results, one or t’other Tony would swoop in and with a swish of an eraser wielding hand, while your back was turned, rub out your data.
It was annoying, but it taught us all a lesson. To use our pens: be committed. Don’t do things by halves.
So, I was thinking about this earlier and how it mirrors, in a way, what we’ve created with doopoll. Each poll we create has a unique 16 character code associated with it, similarly we create a hexadecimal code on each device used to participate in a poll. This means we can identify when a device has already participated and stop people answering more than once from a single device. What this also means, is there is no gaming the system. But also, there is no back button. No going back. You can’t run the experiment over.
Just like us undergrads scrawling in our splashed and smudged notepads back in the 90’s, people participating in our polls have to commit to their answers too.
In our short, beta existence, doopoll has facilitated hundreds of polls, posing thousands of questions, to people all over the world (we now have users in over 80 cities, across 6 continents… if anyone knows an Eskimo could you ask them to sign up, please?). What we’ve learned along the way is by allowing people to answer quickly, via a simple, well designed interface we have also incited more instinctive responses. Instinctive responses, which we believe to be more honest too. We think that’s a good thing and we think the two Tony’s would too.
After all, what’s better than an honest response?
