Awards Voting App
Approached by the event organisers of the Black Country Chamber of Commerce awards, we were asked to develop a voting app for the audience attending the award ceremony.
The plan was to develop a solution that would allow the audience at the awards to participate in the ceremony and vote for an overall winner chosen from the category winners announced during the evening.
It was important to ensure that the solution had robust controls in place so that the winners of each category could not be displayed without the MC’s go ahead, prior to the winners being announced during the event.
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The Challenge
Time and Ease of use are normally quite common requirements for any development, but in this case the time of use was limited to a few short minutes. During this time, the participants would need to be able to quickly access the voting mechanism and be able to place a vote.
- The app must be available to work on all platforms.
- Users are not required to login.
- Voting to be controlled & available for a limited period of time.
- Voting counts must be live.
- Must be able to handle multiple votes being place at the same time.
- Only one vote per person/device.
- Links to award brochures & sponsors.
The Solution
In light of the access requirements + the speed of use in addition to building native apps for iOS and Android we also opted to develop a Progressive Web App, which would ensure all users with access to a web browser could take part in the voting.
The development consisted of the following;
- A Progressive Web app
- iOS & Android Apps
- A hosted admin dashboard
- A web-service to handle the traffic between the apps and the dashboard.
The dashboard was pre-populated with category nominations and winners by the site admin in advance of the ceremony. A toggle switch on the UI made it clear whether voting was on or off and made it easy for the admin to switch the voting on and off during the ceremony. During the closed state app users could only see the nominations for each category. This could be switched on during the evening at a determined point and then switched off again once the voting was complete.
Voters could access the voting app via a URL from a designated website. With no login requirements the user was able to review the nominations for each award and when the voting was opened they could then select their choice from the list of category winners. Once their vote was placed this would instantly update the admin voting form and prevent them from placing any further votes. The admin was able to monitor the voting activity live with access to the results as they continued to update.
Summary
This was a relatively simple solution to build, with speed and ease of access being the key factors. It was important for the organisers to have access to a simple to understand and easy to use monitoring & admin dashboard so that they could control and report on the voting.
The solution also had to cater for voters who had to be able to quickly access the voting mechanism and then be able to place a vote within a short voting window. In a little over a 5 minute period, several hundred votes were placed, with participation just over 70% and the winner announced shortly after.