The North Poll is an online voting app designed for teams that want to vote on issues quickly and without hassle.
The original use case was OKR confidence levels.
By scale, we mean the choices available in a vote, for examples the numbers 1 through 10, the Fibonacci series used for planning poker, or the thumbs up, thumbs down, and shrugging icons.
It's also possible to define your own scale for a single or series of poll. Just give them on the creation page with space or semi-colon between each item.
In a series of polls the choices are the same for each poll. A combined result is presented at the end.
The creator of a poll is directed to a page with links after the poll is created. One link goes to the poll and includes editing privileges, another link goes to the same page but without privileges. The second link is for distribution to participants.
When all choices are numeric, average and standard deviation is presented on the result pages.
There are a few features built into the app for supporting the so-called planning poker sessions that are typically part of refinement meetings in agile development methodologies. Here's a sequence of actions to showcase these features.
The landing page for the app is at https://the-north-poll.herokuapp.com/ where the following is shown:
You can click on the compass icon on any page to come here. Click on Create new poll.
Here you can choose the title and the scale for your polls. If you choose a scale without having entered a title, a default alphabetical series of titles will be filled-in for you.
Scroll down to find the Create new poll button.
After creating the series, you come to the listing page. The URL of this page is what you distribute to the team. That link can be reused for every meeting where you want to vote using the chosen scale. Votes are automatically erased after 12 hours. If you want a new series of polls within 12 hours, you should create a new poll series. If the next meeting is the next day or later, reuse the old one.
The link "A" goes to the first poll in the series. The top one includes editing privileges so that the person who followed that link can update the titles during the meeting to something more meaningful than A, B, C, etc. The other "A" link is for other participants who want to vote but not edit titles.
When the Rename button is clicked, all team members looking at the same poll will see the updated title. This goes for links as well.
At the bottom of the page for the first poll in the series, there's a QR code and a numerical code for finding this page in other ways (not through a distributed URL). The QR code should be scanned on a phone device, and the numerical code can be entered on the landing page.
Now the voting takes place, and each participant can see the current result after their vote. The diagram is updated live until no more votes are cast.
When you reach the end of the series, the person doing the editing can click on a link to add more polls, if necessary.
Note that the web browser's back and forward buttons work as expected with this app.