Currently, opinion polls are conquering the world. There is a lot of reasons why it is so. It is a truly fast and easy way to get opinions and collect suggestions from your friends and colleagues. Moreover, it benefits almost all sectors from education to the business one, not to mention the entertainment sphere. It is fascinating to see how opinion polls are shaping community relations and interaction with customers, for example, social media polls on Instagram and Facebook.
Why You Need an Opinion Poll App?
In fact, voting apps might be considered as a useful instrument for the daily decision-making process, from collecting your friend’s opinion about the current breaking news to getting to know what to wear on the Friday night out or your next vacation destination. Following your business goals, such apps might give you a hint to your next marketing or sales strategy. Due to the fact, opinion polls can be quite handy to collect user and client opinions about the goods and services provided by the company.
Moreover, using a voting system on the governmental level has to be related to the digitalization of society. Therefore, the ability to shift from traditional to modern ways of collecting citizen opinions about the political, social and economic changes in the state, might be a truly revolutionary step towards the transformation. At this point, voting app is a governmental tool to create a cohesive and strong civic society while benefits from technological advancement.
One way or another, the voting app makes our life much easier. Taking that into account, building an opinion poll or voting app for your business purpose or to shape your next project around it - will be a great idea.
Let’s discuss what “must-have” features should be included in the app, what technologies are better to use while building an opinion poll app and what are the main challenges you may face during the new product development process.
Must-Have Features
In order to win your users, you need to come up with a killing features. Having a personal account with all the necessary information won’t be enough today. Users are willing to have certain experience while using your app. That is why the app features should be relevant and respond to customer’s demand. In fact, user interface and experience complemented with efficient features and a successful technological stack is the only way to succeed.
Take a look at the short list of the features that make an opinion poll/voting app appealing to the customers.
Sign in/ log in. The first user experience will be related to the sign in and login of the app. As we mentioned before you won’t surprise users with this feature. However, you can please them with a smooth sign/login experience, as many product owners do not pay enough attention to this trait. For instance, you can expand the option of signing in with the user’s social media accounts, user’s Google account or phone number. It will enrich users option and give the chance to choose the most convenient way personally for them.
Poll builder. You should include different types of the poll and be flexible with the variety of building tools for this purpose. For example, you can provide such questions as single, multiple choices, ranking or descriptive - basically, the more options the better. Users need to feel comfortable while building their polls, so they could have precise answers from others. Additionally, if we are talking about voting apps for governmental purposes the wide range of question choices will be a great advantage, too.
Templates. Users will appreciate the opportunity to choose different temples for different polls and occasions. Also, do not underestimate the power of images. You can even put pictures as question choices, so users could visualize easily the issue and vote for the chosen option.
Notifications. Depending on the scope of your project and the purpose of your voting app, it will be a good feature to add individual notifications as well as reminder feature. It is quite convenient to send an individual invite for a person if the user is interested in a particular opinion.
Statistic. A great feature to track your personal activity and poll’s participation of your connections. Taking into account more complex projects, like educational or healthcare industries are hugely benefited from this feature due to the fact, it provides access to the previous records.
Result visibility. The opportunity to see instant results is another feature that should not be avoided.
Basically, polls can generate purposeful insights, they can also be viewed as just another form of content, with the sole aim of entertaining or informing an audience. Due to the interactive nature brands can also use gamification elements and use the question-based format to create a quiz rather than a simple survey.
Polls have a real-time element attached to them, meaning they’re a great way for brands to enhance existing experiences. For example, when it comes to sporting matches, polls can be used to generate excitement and anticipation around the event.
Technologies to Use
To develop a truly native and reliable app you need to choose the right tech stack. As a core element in the chain of the new product development process, the right technology will serve as a guarantee of the stable work of your app, so the future process of scalability and maintenance won’t be useless.
Read our article How to Choose a Technology Stack for Mobile App Development to know more about the tech stack of the mobile app development process.
Not familiar with web app technologies? Read our article How to Choose a Technology Stack for Web App Development.
Working with both enterprise businesses and startups, we can say that React Native is one of the most demanding technologies on the market for building an opinion poll mobile app. From the personal experience of 2muchcoffee company, we suggest using a React Native technologies for front-end development and GraphQL for backend development. The right technology allows smooth user experience and efficient functionality. Rapid development with clear code structure and a truly native user interface is a core of app’s technologies.
We follow only one rule - to create a reliable and scalable top-notch product. Moreover, it is essential to understand how much time and effort the user could save by using a highly-quality app. We follow these simple rules to create a truly modern with dynamic functionality product. That is why we choose the mentioned technologies to build our recently launched voting app - Rewala. Therefore, you can download it on Android and iOS in order to check how the React Native with the combination of GraphQL create a user-friendly experience.
Rewala - Your Solution in the Daily Decision-Making Process
Sharing your knowledge and the new approaches to the existing issue are a great way to contribute to the tech community and expand your boundaries in software development. Based on the personal experience of developing a voting system app, we know how to produce a reliable and scalable product.
Our team was inspired by the quite familiar situation to all of us - sometimes it might be not that easy to come up with a perfect decision. In this case, a bit of assistance and a small hint from outside is all you need. While developing the app, our devs pursue one aim to create such assistance in the form of the mobile application.
Thus, Rewala is a voting-system app with great usability and design. The user has the chance to create their own polls with no time. Excellence in interface design and customization allow adding and changing profile and poll images. Due to the statistics, there is an opportunity to see the number of voters from the number of participants. A search engine allows to find people by name and add it to your list of contacts.
Due to the tech stack and the clear architecture of the app, the process of scalability will be fast and efficient. In fact, the app is oriented to expand its potential on the voting arena and mark the development of the opinion-poll system practice.
Challenges during the Development Process
As the saying goes: “Forewarned is forearmed”. Therefore, our team picked up the most common issues and challenges that might happen during the app development process. Starting from the minor bugs to the major mistakes in a security system, you need to pay attention to the following list and remember that each and every case is a unique one.
Competitive market. The mobile app development market is fierce. It is necessary to figure out what are the triggers for the target market and what the users want. Product owners, as well as devs, have to understand what appeals to users and keep the app innovative and responsive to the market demand.
Different Devices & Screen Sizes compatibility. One of the possible challenges for app development is to deal with the different screen sizes and devices that the app will need to fit. You need to be sure that all devices and screens could be able to fit perfectly to the format of the app. The solution here is a Responsive Design for apps. Responsive App Design gives screens more flexibility and thus can be adjusted to suit different screen sizes and various formats.
Dealing with Different OS’s. In fact, a different OS may cause various issues. There are main systems like Android, iOS, and Windows. Each of those has its own technologies and individual set of UI objectives and patterns. Devs should be ready to deal with fixing bugs separately for each system. This practice might be quite time-consuming. In this case, preparation with a market testing phase is recommended to deal with technical OS issues. Developers can also release a beta version of the app to develop on later with regular updates.
Security. Building an app that will contain personal details and information it is important to take care of the security measures in order to provide data breaches. Additional layers of security measures. Like authorization and identity confirmation would not be superfluous.
Mobile app promotion and marketing. How to make the app discoverable in the app store? How to make users install the app? How to keep users engaged in the app? What type of monetization to choose? Promotion of the app is a crucial stage where the product’s brand is steadily constructed. Subsequently, to make the previous work of development is valuable the app should be successfully promoted.
Prospects of Development
Previously we stated that developing a voting app for the bigger projects, for example, like governmental elections or social opinion polling is a great way to create a truly digital pattern of development. Currently, there are several organizations that are working on building voting apps for the future presidential or parliament elections. That is why developing a voting app that could operate the huge amount of data is a top subject in the IT sector.
Due to the fact, elections require authentication of voters’ identity and security in keeping their records as well as votes. In that case, blockchain tools could serve as a foundational framework for tracking and counting votes. Potentially such practice will eliminate the need for recounts by taking voter fraud and foul play off the table. By capturing votes as transactions through blockchain, governments and voters would have a verifiable audit trail, ensuring no votes are changed or removed and no illegitimate votes are added. In fact, integration of the blockchain technology into the online voting process could boost voter participation and help restore the public's trust in the electoral process.
In fact, blockchain technologies for voting or survey apps are the solution on how to manage a great amount of data without the negative side effects for the processes. Actually, incorporating blockchain tools into the voting app development will help many industries to expand their functions and provide better services.
The voting app is the best option for …
Medical and healthcare industry. It is one of the sectors that operate with a huge amount of data on a daily basis. Instead of filling long forms about vaccinations and other illnesses, there is a chance to transform this entire health survey into a mobile app through the survey application development. It will give real-time data at the back office and provide information can be processed a lot effectively as well as faster.
Government. Operating with the largest data in the world, the government has to take various surveys from time to time in order to manage their activity more effectively. In addition, to have access to live data is another factor that will contribute to a stable and reliable decision-making process.
Education sector. The mobile opinion polls help students to evaluate the level of understanding a certain topic, survey of faculty and student opinion. It is a great way to understand student’s satisfaction from the programs, services and other aspects of their educational experience.
Hospitality industry. This is might be the most well-known industry that is hugely benefited from the customer’s feedback. Restaurants and hotels often provide customer feedback in order to understand the level of satisfaction and needs, so future improvements could be done. Besides, mobile survey apps provide the facility to have feedback for both good and bad experiences which can benefit the business a lot.
Retail industry. With the rising trend of using mobile phones for retail purposes, the opinion poll apps will be an excellent tool in reviewing or sharing customer’s personal experience regarding the property searching process. This exercise will provide detailed inputs on the customer trends in buying and other specifics like brands, products, etc..
Interested in building your own real estate app? Read our article How to Build a Real Estate App: Features and Tech Stack.
Conclusion
Voting apps might be considered as a useful instrument for the daily decision-making process, from collecting your friend’s opinion about the current breaking news to getting to know what to wear on the Friday night out or your next vacation destination. Following your business goals, such apps might give you a hint to your next marketing or sales strategy. Moreover, voting app is the best option for healthcare, education, retail, hospitality industries as well as it is a powerful tool in the governmental sector.
In order to build a reliable and scalable opinion poll or voting app you should come up with unique features and think carefully about the tech stack of your app. Consequently, killing features will appeal more users while the right technologies will serve as a core foundation to the future maintenance process.
Sharing your knowledge and the new approaches to the existing issue are a great way to contribute to the tech community and expand your boundaries in software development. Based on the personal experience of developing a voting system app, we know how to produce a reliable and scalable product.
In case you have any questions or you think about building your own voting app, feel free to contact our team.We will help you in any inquiry!
