Ideas come and go, some just fade with time because you didn’t follow up on them and others simply weren’t worth following. This happens to almost everyone. We have the capacity to think infinitely but not all of us can do abstract thinking right away, it’s a process that just gets better and better as you containerize your thoughts, connect the containers that need connecting and separate the ones that need separating.
Last week an idea called Pollster got containerized via human abstract thinking when we decided to build and launch Pollster in 5 days. Why 5 days?Given the App Store review holiday schedule and our urge to get the app out before christmas so users can seek and share opinions through polls around Christmas and New Year’s.
Before we start here is how it all started. We build mobile enterprise software at CORPA and we had been working on a news feed feature called Instant Poll for teams and businesses to run instant polls (from evaluations to strategy to decision making). Before realeasing our update with the instant poll feature though we tried the polls internally for a while and simply loved it. The love for this feature was simplicity and result.
Most of us love to share opinions within meetings or have conversations but then they become less objective at some point and you realise what was the consensus after all? CORPA Instant Poll changed that for us. We felt more objective when there was a decision to be made and it required objective feedback from people with freedom to think about the options in their own time. Having said that we still discuss stuff and have conversations. When we had this AHA! moment (or may be you could call it an epiphany) we came up with the idea of Pollster — simple and instant social polls to seek and share opinions based on common interests like business, politics, science, art and more with people all over the world. Since we couldn’t afford to put forth too many resources we put together a team of 3 people who fell in love with the idea to get it done and set the 4 day timeline to finish the project.
The idea & design phase — Crunching, massaging & brainstorming (0.5 days)
Although we had done instant polls for CORPA the idea behind Pollster was different so we had to completely change the logic. We therefore decided to start with a clean slate and a simple thought related to the current state of social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al). With these two pieces we started to put together the Pollster puzzle. Without going into too many technical details let’s for a moment think about the biggest issues faced by the current social networking platforms — noise, troll, abuse and privacy. To put it simply, you write a post or tweet it generates huge amounts of noise through comments, retweets, quoted tweets, likes; gets trolled via the very same comments if peope don’t like what you are saying and then there is privacy which is a much larger issue. We brainstormed around these issues quite a bit and thought about taking out every feature that may lead to these very same issues if and when people use Pollster. This hugely simplified things, for example, we didn’t even have to think about commenting infrastructure, how to friend other people, open profiles or even sign up. Yes you read that correctly — no open profiles (people can’t see anything more than your poll, if you create one, picture and name in the poll feed), you can’t follow people in Version 1.0 (not at least until we figure out what follow means and does) but you can follow common interests instead and your vote in a poll is anonymous so neither the creator nor the participants of a poll know who answered the poll or what the answer was. We decided to use Google, Facebook and Twitter as log in mechanisms so you don’t have to sign up for yet another service. We don’t even store your profile picture so that goes for basic privacy at least, right? Once we had the clear idea what we should do we took a minimalist approach towards the UI with a simple log in screen; a private profile page with your name, profile picture, email, interest (which leads to interests picker view) and log out options; a main view (the poll feed view) where you see all the polls in Pollster and a view to create a poll. That’s it!
Base & coding phase— Code, code, code (3.5 days)
We distributed the work plan in a way where one person would focus on backend and one on front end with third person on UI — building wireframes, website, getting App Store uploading ready, marketing content etc. Leadership is important to execute any project but even more important in a sprint projects like this to keep the team (irrespective of the size) on the track with eyes on the prize. The other thing to keep in mind during development is to use solid libraries and frameworks that save you time from trying to reinvent the wheel. Moving on…
We did some coding initially. Then we followed it up with some coding and we did some coding to finish it off. 3.5 days of continuous coding. In those moments you think of the project as a sprint and yourself as an athelete so you become unstoppable. We enjoyed every bit of it. There is no better feeling that achieving what might have initially seemed impossible to achieve. Time has an essence of making you do beautiful stuff especially when it’s limited. We completed all the features and views right on time as we intended to. It may as well have been the most productive time of our lives.
Testing, testing and more testing phase(1 day)
With all the excitement ramping up we knew that there was still so much more to do before uploading it to the App Store. Now is when you actually start testing the app out on a real device. It’s also time to try and break your app and figure out all the changes you need to make. As expected we found the bugs and issues, fixed them and starting preparing for App Store upload. At 3 am we uploaded the app with the hope to get it approved the next day. We also gave the app to some friends and relatives who came back to us with feedback and suggestions some of which was obvious and some impossible to do within the last day of the project in the middle of testing. We will follow up on that feedback and those suggestions of course.
At the end, we built and launched the Version 1.0 of Pollster in 4 days with pure hard work, determination and love for the idea of letting people seek and share opinions through polls in an instant, anonymous and simple way.
We will add more functionality going forward but for now we would love for you to try it. You can download the free app from App Store. Please share Pollster with others.
Thank you!
Pollster Team
Do let us know your thoughts, suggestions and feedback at hello@pollsterhq.com
Visit us at www.pollsterhq.com
