Sujjest

Sujjest is a new app you can use to plan get-togethers collaboratively by suggesting options and voting. Sujjest is comparable to popular tools like Doodle or Facebook Messenger’s polling feature, but unlike a poll, in Sujjest it’s always clear how many votes an option needs to win.

Don’t just take a poll—vote!

Polling and voting have traditionally served different purposes. You take a poll just to get a picture of participant preferences and hold a vote to make a collective choice among options. Your vote is a commitment to a possible outcome, whereas your response to a poll is an act of self-expression that doesn’t necessarily contribute to a decision.

These basic distinctions have been blurred by the use of polls to enhance other styles of planning. In Facebook Messenger, polls supplement messaging. In Doodle, polls are created by and for a group leader.

Votes have a definite threshold of support at which an option wins. Polls don’t. The difference matters because when an option is said to “win” a poll, it’s merely someone’s judgement call. That’s a sloppy and potentially contentious way to go about a “group” decision.

We believe that defining when an option should become a group decision is best left up to those making the decision together, so Sujjest equally empowers all participants to adjust the threshold to fit their group and the nature of whatever they’re deciding.

Actual voting has a decisive edge over plans made via poll, offering a substantially more reliable experience, while also injecting a little competitive fun into the planning process. With the limitations of polls in mind, there are still aspects in which they are comparable though, so let’s take a look and see how Sujjest’s design differs.

Polling in Doodle

Doodle made its name as a time-coordination tool for event organizers — often among the most challenging aspects of planning get-togethers. Doodle’s implementation of polling isn’t intended to make planning events a team sport so much as to make it easier to lead.

Inequality between the role of poll creator and other participants is built into Doodle. Perhaps the clearest sign that the app isn’t designed for collaborative planning is that participants can’t add options. The poll administrator also gets to “finalize” any option whenever they want, regardless of the results.

In Doodle’s mobile app, the default view (even for the poll administrator) doesn’t display anyone else’s responses, just the list of available options.

Doodle’s “table view” — which is the only way to see poll results — is a colored grid of every poll participant and their response (or lack thereof) to every option, in the style of a spreadsheet. It’s not an easy way to visualize poll results and in a large group the forest would be lost for the trees. Even a bar graph would make it easier to see a group’s overall preferences than a grid.

A final quirk of Doodle worth noting is that all participants have the ability not only to invite others, but to manually add other people’s names to the list of poll respondents, then vote on behalf of these s̶o̶c̶k̶ ̶p̶u̶p̶p̶e̶t̶s̶ participants. Administrators, meanwhile, can change anyone’s votes at will.

At every turn, Doodle shows itself to be just a way for group leaders to solicit input before deciding whatever they please, not a tool for deciding as a group by voting.

Voting in Sujjest

The presence of a finish line eliminates all uncertainty about whether a leading option is or isn’t the group decision yet. Unlike a poll, no one is left to guess about when there are enough responses.

In Sujjest, you’re free to invite however many people may be interested in helping to shape a plan together and if part of the group wants to decide without waiting for approval from the rest, then they’re free to tap the finish line closer to reach an agreement sooner.

How many people have been invited to participate in a group decision matters, so Sujjest shows it, both in the number of steps the race is divided into and with a participant list directly under the race.

Whenever anyone taps an option, those who have approved it are shown circled in the participant list. And by tapping a participant’s picture, you can highlight all the options they’ve approved at once. Which of you