Twentynine Palms, California; 06, May 2015: Have you ever tried to arrange a dinner with your friends and gotten stuck in the back-and-forth as you try to balance everyone’s preferences? Even with just a few restaurants to choose from and a small group of friends, it can be pretty hard to figure out what’s going to make the group happiest.
Shamis Fallah and her husband Chris Loer ran into this problem and tried using online polling software to coordinate their plans, but found that it was too complicated to use when all they wanted was a quick decision. So when Shamis’ career with the US Navy started bringing frequent moves, Chris decided to leave his job at IBM and make a smartphone app that could solve the problem. The result is the free VoteUp app, released first in the Apple App Store, and now available for Android in the Google Play Store.
With the VoteUp app, you create polls that have a list of options. The options can be anything you’d like: restaurants, places, movies, or even pictures of the things you’re trying to decide on. Once you’ve made the poll, you send invitations to your friends with a text message link. Anyone with a smartphone can vote — they just rate each option on a “love it” to “hate it” scale. Once you close the poll, everyone can see which options were most loved overall along with everyone’s individual votes.
Nina Paul, of Twentynine Palms, used VoteUp recently to plan a night out. She noticed that “my friends were more open about what they didn’t like when they had an easy way to rate everything, and that turned out to make our discussion about what to do a lot easier.”
After releasing his initial version of the app on the Apple App Store, Chris saw users from around the world start to use VoteUp, and got valuable feedback on how to streamline the app. Since his goal is to share the app as widely as possible, developing a version for Android was always high on his to-do list. Using a “hybrid mobile app” approach based on the Ionic Framework, he was able to completely rewrite VoteUp over the course of a few months, incorporating many of the lessons learned from the iPhone app into a new design.
About Uxor Navium Labs:
Chris Loer founded Uxor Navium Labs, LLC in 2014 with the goal of helping people turn their opinions into actions. Chris believes technology is at its best when it connects people to each other and the world around them. Uxor Navium Labs’ first product is the free VoteUp app, available for iPhone in the App Store and now for Android phones in the Google Play Store.
For Media Contact:
http://voteupapp.com
@VoteUpApp
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