Loop – Social Polling: decision-making now is someone else’s job

Loop 1O.K., so you are sitting around, thinking about what you want to eat for dinner, but you can’t decide. Should you go out to sushi? Maybe it would be easier to have a pizza delivered. Maybe you should finally start that diet and have a nice piece of chicken. Some decisions are too hard to make.

Loop – Social Polling makes it easy for you to ask others what they think you should do. If you need some advice about whether to cut your hair, make a Loop to see what your friends think…

Design

The app is designed to look similar to a blog roll. Each Loop is listed on a scroll down page, separated by a black border. The bottom of the app shows the different sections available to you. You can see Loops from people you are following, explore polls that are made public, add your own Loop, see the ones that you’ve made private so that only friends can access them, and view your profile.

When you explore Loop, you will see all of the questions that users have made public. Questions like, “What is your favorite flavor of ice-cream?” or “Do you like the name, Ralph?” will be available for you to check out. When you respond to a poll, you will see the current stats of the answer. For example, if you voted on the question regarding the name Ralph, you would see the percentage of people who voted yes and no. If you scroll down even further, you will see an infograph of how many males voted versus how many females and the percentage of voters in different age groups. If you select a specific gender or age group, you will see the infograph with information relating to that filter.

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App Use

To add your own Loop, tap the plus (+) symbol at the bottom center of the screen. Then, type in the question you want to ask. Be sure that your question can be answered with multiple choice or yes/no. For example, it may not be a good idea to ask what everyone’s favorite movie is. That is too vague. However, you could ask which movie they think is the best out of a select number. For example, I asked, “Goonies or Gremlins.” I got 27 votes and 81 percent were for Goonies. So, if I was going to argue with someone that Goonies was more popular than Gremlins. I could back that up with my own personal poll.

After you enter your question, you will be able to customize the answer options. If you asked a simple yes-or-no question, select the yes/no tab. If you asked a question that has multiple response possibilities, tap the “Custom” tab and enter the answers in each tab. You can offer up to 10 different answers for people to vote on. However, the more you have, the harder it is to get a good reading.

After customizing your answer options, you can add a picture to get your point across. Tap the camera icon to the right of the Loop. You can find images by searching on Pinterest, Google, Amazon, or by uploading your own image from your iPhone’s photo library. You can even have a different photo for individual answers. For example, if you want to take a poll of which shoes go better with your outfit, you could take a picture of each one and let people choose by looking for themselves.

The next step is to post your Loop. You can either make it private so that only people you choose on your friend’s list will see it, or you can make it public so that anyone with Loop will be able to vote. You can also share your Loop to Facebook and Twitter.

When you share your Loop, either on Facebook and Twitter, or directly through email and text message, the recipients will be able to see the question, but in order to vote and see the stats of the vote, they will have to download Loop themselves.

I posted a question to Facebook and, since my friends had not yet downloaded the app, they simply commented under the posting. So, there are ways to get responses from friends without them having to join Loop.

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The Good

Not only do I like asking questions to see my own personal results of a random poll involving a wide variety of people, but I love answering other’s questions, too. When you vote on someone’s Loop, you can see how many people voted for the different responses. It is fun to see what others think about things you like and don’t like.

The Bad

When you create a Loop and want to check on the stats, you can’t tell how many people voted for a particular response without voting on it yourself. For example, if I asked whether I should watch a movie or read a book, the only way I could see which event won is if I voted myself. That sort of defeats the purpose of creating a Loop. Your own response could affect the outcome of the poll. The fact that people must download the app in order to vote is kind of a drawback too.

Value

Loop – Social Polling is free to download and is a lot of fun to play with. It is nothing more than a bit of entertainment, but could suck you in for an hour if you aren’t paying attention.

Conclusion

People who get a kick out of finding out what other people think will love reading the stats on questions that are posed in this app. You can get pretty fast results from users about things you are having trouble deciding on. If you have enough friends using Loop as well, you could get immediate responses for important questions like, “Should I go on a second date?” This app is available for the iPhone 3GS or newer and third generation iPod touch and newer running iOS 6.0 or higher. Download it in the App Store today.

Related Apps

Show of Hands is another polling app that lets you vote and see results of polls, but it is a little more on the serious side. Thumb is a social app that lets you vote yes or no on polls. Surveys on the Go actually pays you for answering surveys, but you don’t get to see the results.