Free APIs for your polling pleasure

Happy New Year folks!. Finally we are out with some of our cool Free API’s.

Every poll of yours will have the following new menu link showing up on the left hand side.

You will be shown a screen with all the freely available APIs which we have provided. The help icon on the screen will take you to the API documentation of the individual apis.

In summary here is the list of API’s that we have rolled out. For more detailed api documenation you can go here.

1. Vote API
Allows voting on a specific option on your poll .

2. Get Votes count API
This API lets you know the votes recieved for a particular poll and the individual votes for the poll options.

3. Get Poll Results URL API
This API will let you get the result URL for the poll. This is the URL to our famous results dashboard.

4. Get Poll Embed Code API
This API will let you get the embedded code for your poll. You can use this code script in your website or blog or wherever you want to display your poll.

5. Get Polls API
This API will return all the polls which are there in your account. You can then use the poll information wherever you wish.

6. Get All Votes API
This API will return you all the vote results for all your polls.

So HAPI APIing!

UPDATE: There is a good example of how a customer of ours uses the poll api on their home page to get customer feedback on which content (coloring pages) to publish here.

Monitor your online training and webinars

Jun29

One of our customers uses our polls very creatively. She creates polls before her webinars which are relevant to the content of her online webinar. She uses Webex and before she starts the session she lets the participant know that there would be mini quizes between her sessions. This keeps most of the particpants on their toes.

The chat window in Webex would be used to send the link to the poll. The main objective is to see that the participants have picked up what the key points are. She shares the results of the polls with the rest of the participants. If the results were worse than what she expected, she would simply repeat the topic where they had trouble understanding the key points. Keeping the results anonymous is good for her participants.

It is refreshing to see how this simplistic ‘quizzing’ improves the quality of her webinars progressively during the webinar.

If you folks have other ideas or places where you have used polls before or would like to use polls, don’t hesitate to post your comments.

Hick’s law – why polls should have less options

Jun23

Hick’s law ( from wikipedia) describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has.

It’s mathematically described as T = blog2(n + 1), where the simple explanation is that time T is dependent on the number of choices (n) and this relationship is logarithmic.

More choices means more time to make a decision; making it less likely any one of the provided options will be chosen. Now you know (scientifically) why landing pages for internet products has limited navigation and presents you usually only with one or two options.

When designing a poll, you should remember that you are eventually going to ask people to fill it out. A poll with more than 7 options will make things harder for the users. The rule of thumb for getting more participation is to minimize the number of options.