Yes, you could find people on the Internet who haven’t heard of the term Straw Poll but if you are a regular user of Reddit you are bound to come across and voted in a poll that was hosted or created by the community’s most sought-after web service for polling. It is simple and functional and that is one of the many reasons why Redditors have officially chosen Straw Poll as their poll option. This amazing creation from Dan Kirk has created more than 3.5 million polls since its inception.

How did Straw Poll begin?

It all began around 6 years back in the form of a weekend project. Dan Dirks, its creator was a professional software engineer who was very curious regarding the creation of a poll service which was entirely based on the efficient and fast node.js. Now let us talk about the service Straw Poll provides to its users. It can be termed as the simplest polling services ever provided in the Internet. Firstly, users don’t need to open an account although Dan Dirks is thinking about planning to release the updated versions which would necessitate the opening of an account. Users can access any simple poll with the help of a few clicks. Secondly it is completely free with the occasional occurrence of a few ads which in no way interfere or hinder the website’s usability.

Why is it so successful?

The reasons are pretty obvious as Straw Poll got most of the basics correct. They offered all the right basic things which has made it so popular in current times. The new version also lets you add captcha verification of every participant taking part in the poll. Users are also allowed to save the poll as a draft through a link. Dan did a great job by focusing on the core services that Straw Poll intended to provide rather than adding tons of features on the app. This has made the basic services more stable and faster than ever.

How to use for creating an online poll?

Now that you have had a basic understanding of what Straw Poll is and why it is as popular as it is today, it is essential to know how to effectively use the platform for online polls. By following the steps mentioned below one can easily create a poll on Straw Poll and have fun.

1. Open the Straw Poll service you will be directed to the Home page. The fun part is that you don’t even have to click on any link for new poll because the Home page is actually a new poll page. You can easily go to the poll URL by clicking on the Create Poll option on that page. The URL of the poll can then be later shared with friends on social networks such as Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. One striking fact is the drastic lack of clicking on Straw Poll which other polling apps include to a large extent. In Straw Poll once you fill in the first 4 options it automatically provides suggestions for the next option.
2. There are a large number of advanced options that are offered by Straw Poll including multiple polling options. There are two options that restrict duplicate voting. Firstly, it either lets you ignore the checking when more than one vote are entered from a single location. Secondly it lets voters solve out a captcha or a short test which verifies that the voters are all humans. It is a common enough feature on the web and Straw Poll uses it effectively for your polls also.

The Few Important Factors are:

1. In case you are not ready to publish the poll Straw Poll provides you an option for saving the poll for later use. The current version which is devoid of any user account provides the users an option to save the URL of that poll in the form of a draft. You can revisit this saved draft whenever you wish to. The fascinating fact about this draft option is that you have the ability to publish more than one poll in the future on the basis of the same poll.
2. When you finish creating your poll Straw Poll provides you the URL of the poll. You have the option then to share the poll URL or embed the app through a website or in a blog post.
3. The results of the polls are visible to any other users as Straw Poll doesn’t facilitate user accounts. This transparency is one aspect that makes Straw Poll so preferable to the Redditors. Straw Poll shows the total number of polls along with the percentage against each option. Moreover, it provides a graph containing all the necessary data. All you have to do is click on “Results” or just add a/r to any of the poll’s URL.

Always open to suggestions

Although people love Straw Poll for its earnest simplicity they can also provide suggestions and report bugs about the service on a hosted response forum known as Github.