Pocket Poll

Expedite Group Decisions

What is Pocket Poll?

How often have you reached a stalemate with your friends when trying to figure out where to eat? Or with your significant other who can’t decide what tv show he or she wants to watch? Pocket Poll seeks to fix such group decisions by leveraging stored personal preferences to produce an optimal choice for any given event.

How do I use Pocket Poll?

Pocket Poll utilizes three main features: categories, groups, and events. Categories are collections of choices with ratings. The category can be whatever you want it to be such as movies, food, video games, favorite cephalopod, etc. Each choice has a rating from 0-5, with 0 being the lowest rating and 5 the highest. You can always edit your ratings for your friend’s categories, so that your opinions can be heard in all group decisions. If you really like their category, you can even copy it to make your own version! Categories themselves are independent entities. To be utilized, they must be attached to a group.

Groups are collections of members that house events. Inside a group you can edit its name, icon, and settings unique to groups such as whether the group is private or not. To be able to create events in a group, you must attach a category to it. Groups can have as many categories attached to it as you wish, but an event can only have one category attached to it. Take, for example, a group with a 'Food' category attached to it. You could create an event called “Lunch” using this 'Food' category, and it will pull all the choices and the ratings that each group member has for this category in order to produce the optimal choices.

Events have multiple stages possible. The “consider” stage is when group members can decide if they want their choices leveraged by our algorithm. By default, all members of the group are considered. Once this stage ends, our algorithm produces three optimal choices to vote on. The choice that receives the highest number of votes by the end of the voting stage wins. The winning result is displayed to the group along with the start time of the event. At any stage, you can easily add the event to your phone's calendar app!