We’re always seeking out new ways to learn what other people think – whether you need an opinion on which app you should choose or have questions concerning a small business you want to start. Large companies and other major organizations have teams at their disposal to accomplish this. They’re able to question and analyze the results of asking their questions of large groups of people relevant to their organization or cause. Obviously the majority of us can’t afford such teams, so we’re left to our own devices. We can try asking groups like our Facebook friends, but those groups can be fairly homogenous. Yacket is a cool new web app which aims to provide a way for the majority of us to ask questions and get answers from a variety of people.
Yacket is a new survey/polling site powered by user’s questions. Ask any question you can think of, and it’s placed on the site. Visitors to Yacket can then answer the poll, and any data that Yacket knows about them is utilized in the analysis and breakdown of the answers. You can view anonymous results of how users answer based upon various factors, including gender, age, religion and much more. It’s an interesting premise and I got into it pretty quickly. Stick with me after the jump to learn more about Yacket and see what I really thought of it.
Premise of Yacket
Ok, so here’s how Yacket works. The site thrives on user participation – with very few exceptions, users ask (and obviously answer) all of the questions on the site. With that in mind, the ability to ask your own questions is the basic premise of the site. You can ask questions about anything your heart desires – the current selection is quite varied. Users have asked questions about the latest technology, which business you would choose and even dinosaurs (my latest contribution). It’s up to you to come up with the best questions – whether it’s a question for professional purposes or just a personal curiosity.
Creating a question.
Answering a question is quite simple. While questions do close after a given period of time has passed, questions stay open to answer for at least a week. If a question is still available, your answer options will show up directly on the question. Just click your choice and you’re done. You can look at the analytics and statistics at this time. We’ll get more into the specific areas later, but you can view a variety of statistical data based upon what users have uploaded about themselves. Things like age, beliefs about climate change and even diet will show up in the analysis. Take a look around and check it out before we talk about submitting your own questions for answers.
Some basic analytics.
Contributing Your Own Content
So I mentioned that asking questions is definitely what Yacket was made for, but how do you go about proposing questions of your own? Well first of all, click on add a question at the top of the page. Currently you can only choose from three question types – yes/no, multi-option or battle. Yes/no is a simple yes or no question. Multi-option is an open-ended question of any type, with up to four answers available. A battle question allows you to pit any two twitter users against one another.
The various question types – note that more are coming soon.
Once you’ve taken a look and selected your question type, it’s simply a matter of filling in the basic data. Provide a question, answers and twitter handles as needed. While the question types are pretty limited, Yacket is currently polling users on whether they would like to be able to use images as answers or not. It seems that Yacket will definitely be adding more soon, so I’m really looking forward to that.
Let’s touch back on answering questions one more time – an important part of providing content. You taking the time to answer questions as well as asking them is integral to the success of Yacket. Who wants to participate in a polling site where you only get one or two answers? No one. If you sign up, make sure you spend some time going through and answering questions. It’s kind of necessary anyway – you can’t see the analysis before answering (but more on that in the next section).
Various questions available to answer.
Discovering and Analyzing
Now lets talk about how to use the tools and information contributed by other users. In order to find the best users to follow, you want to check out their profile. You (and other users) can choose to put up a variety of biographical information, including age, location and a description of yourself. For easier sharing and connectivity, you can also choose to connect your profile to Facebook and Twitter, though neither are required. When you find a profile that you’re into, simply follow the profile and their questions will be easily accessible for you.
My profile.
Once you’ve followed a few profiles, you can really start to explore the different ways to discover other user’s questions. Your main “stream” of questions contains users you follow and questions you’ve adopted (adopting questions means you promote them yourself, in addition to whoever created the question, and can be done from any question view). There are other streams to explore as well. You can check out the most popular questions, unanswered questions, questions you have answered yourself and simply a stream of all the questions on Yacket. These are fun ways to find more questions to answer and analyze as you explore the site.
The Yacket stream – all the questions that have been asked.
Once you’ve found questions you’re interested in, we can take an in-depth look at the analytics. There are several different categories of analytics. We can look at:
- General – things like age and gender
- Relationships, Family & Sexuality – things like relationship status and sexual orientation
- Professional & Education
- Technology – things like OS and browser choice
- Location
- Politics & Religion
- I believe … – stances on things like climate change and same-sex marriage
- About Me – questions about topics like diet and smoking
These statistics are shown in both a linear format and as an interactive graph following each breakdown. It’s a great, extremely visual way to really get a feel for how different people feel regarding different subjects.
An example of a more detailed analysis – various diet types.
Using Yacket
Yacket is awesome. It’s a great concept, the site is well designed and easy to use, and I’ve learned some interesting things about people’s opinions. I actually like the way it shares my questions easily via my social networks (only when I choose), encouraging other users to sign up for the site. It’s well laid out, and I really don’t have any complaints about the way the site runs at this point.
The biggest downfall, of course, is the lack of a large, committed user base. I posted a question yesterday and still haven’t gotten a single response. It doesn’t exactly want to make me return to the site anytime soon … though I will. Yacket is a site that I really want to see stick around, so I’ll continue using it. I think the app is a fantastic tool, and it’s an example of a dedicated tool that we can all make use of. I hope that the usage picks up with time, because I can’t wait to have the site work like it really should.
And what do you think of Yacket so far? Have you tried it out? Do you have a polling site you prefer to use instead? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!