The other night, I couldn’t decide between going to the gym or seeing a movie (I live a terribly exciting life). Naturally, my first thought was that I should ask the Internet. I’ve tried this on my preferred social networks before, but I never get the simple responses that I want. What I really need is a simple yes or no.
Not surprisingly, there’s a few apps for that. I’ve tried out a couple, but one of my favourites has become Seesaw, an app that combines light social networking with making polls and getting answers to life’s most complicated questions (such as, “Which shirt should I wear tonight?”). Want to know if Seesaw is for you? Read on.
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Seesawing Up and Down
To help me with my dilemma between being healthy or gouging on extra-buttery popcorn during Fast & Furious 6, I launched Seesaw and set up a poll asking what I should do. I used the app’s Pinterest search functionality to find a picture from a gym and a picture of a movie theatre, and used a hashtag to ask the popular #whatshouldido question. I ended up going to the gym, and the majority vote ended up agreeing with that decision. (I also felt healthy, so that worked out, if you’ll pardon the pun.)
Setting up a poll isn’t hard.
What pleasantly surprised me about my experiences with Seesaw was how easy it is to use. You use pictures to ask a question, but you don’t need to use more than one (although you can have up to four). If you want to vote on a poll, you just have to tap on a photo and you’ll cast your vote on whichever option the picture is associated with.
Tell Your Friends
The app comes with its own built-in social network of sorts as well. Users can follow you and you can follow them and receive a notification whenever they ask a new question. You can also mention others in your polls if you’re looking for their opinion specifically.
You can create your own profile, including a bio.
And like many other social networks, you can set up your own profile with your own bio and website. You can link other major social networks to your Seesaw profile if you want to easily share a poll you just made with your friends or your wider Twitter audience. You can also send your polls as a text message. The point is to ensure that all of your friends can vote without using the app or even an iPhone to do it.
Making Indecisiveness Chiq
Seesaw is a really well-designed app. Its biggest competitor, Polar, which we’ve reviewed before, feels a few worlds behind in terms of visual aesthetics. Seesaw’s interface is unique and colourful, and it’s fun to play with. I didn’t feel the same sense of joy when I was using Polar.
It doesn’t get much more cut-and-dry than this (admittedly, Seesaw’s users could be biased).
Seesaw is intuitive, but at the same time, very powerful. There’s a lot of functionality in the app. That being said, what I really like is that it feels modern. Nobody’s going to call Seesaw beautiful, but its functionality is covered with gloss.
The app doesn’t conform specifically to all of Apple’s design standards, but it importantly avoids feeling cluttered. The major difference between Seesaw and competitors such as Polar is that Seesaw simply offers more options. You can make your polls bigger with more photos, hashtag them and even tag your friends just like you would on Twitter.
Seesaw allows you to include four images in a single poll.
And the comparison to Polar does need to be made, because Polar is as clean as a whistle. But Seesaw has a more modern aesthetic that feels warmer, likely thanks to its colour palette.
Nothing’s Perfect
That being said, even a modern design doesn’t save an app from other imperfections. Admittedly, a feature I really missed in Polar is the ability to skip polls I wasn’t interested in with the tap of a button. I can scroll past them in Seesaw, but in Polar I could hide them indefinitely.
The notifications need to be mentioned as well. There are so many of them in Seesaw. For a few hours the other day, my phone was buzzing every minute or two to tell me that somebody had voted on a poll I had created. There’s a lot of people voting on Seesaw, so I’m not sure how much sense it makes to be informed every time another vote lands on your polls. The notification settings are a little tucked away in the app (the top left of the Activity Center), but once I found them, I turned most of them off.
This list could end up being the death of you.
Finally, I’m not sure that Pinterest is the best place to go for image searches. I haven’t had too much trouble finding what I’m looking for, but a plain Google image search would likely be more powerful and get better results. With Pinterest, I find I have to be much more specific with my search terms than I do with Google.
I’d also like to see the app feel more personal. This really comes down to the app’s featured curation. Featured polls (in the Explore section) are often filled with fashion-related posts, which to me implies the app is either more popular with women than it is with men, or it’s a sounding board for a lot of companies to test the market viability of their products. (And even if it’s not, the fact that I’m suspicious means there’s something wrong.) My suggestion is simply more varied curation. I don’t like the design as much, but I feel like Polar often had more consistently interesting polls for my taste.
Making a Decision
I think that Seesaw has a really smart design. I like using the app more than I like using Polar, but I feel like I’m alone here. Nobody I know on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram use the app, and I feel like I’m the lone male asking about going to the gym in a sea of women asking what shirt they should wear when they go out (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Right now, the app is simply catering to a specific audience and I don’t think I’m a part of it.
I’d love to see more users on Seesaw and I’d love to interact with people I know there, but for now, some people will be better off with a competing app. Both Polar and Seesaw are free, and at the end of the day, I’d still recommend trying both before making a decision.