You might not have used StrawPoll.Me. Then again, if you use Reddit regularly, you’ve almost certainly voted in a poll that was created and hosted on the online community’s most popular polling web service. Simple and functional, Redditors have embraced Dan Dirks’s creation as their unofficial poll option, creating over 3.5 million polls on the service!

StrawPoll.Me started its life almost 4 years ago as a weekend project. Its creator, professional software engineer Dan Dirks, was curious about creating a poll service based on the incredibly fast and efficient node.js.

The service is, in its core, probably one of the most simple polling services in the world. It doesn’t require a user account (although Dan has said he is planning to release it, and it was a part of the last beta release), just a few clicks that will give you a simple poll. While StrawPoll.Me is completely free and does serve some ads, they don’t in any way hinder the usability of the website.

StrawPoll.Me tried to get the basic things it offers right, an approach that has made it as popular as it is. It was only recently, a week ago, that Dan released the new 2.1. version of the app that adds CAPTCHA verification of participants in the poll, as well as the ability to save a draft of a poll as a link. Instead of adding lots and lots of features that most of StrawPoll.Me’s users actually don’t need, Dan has focused on making the core services as stable and fast as possible.

Lets see how StrawPoll.Me actually works:

How to Create a Poll with StrawPoll.Me

1. As soon as you open the service, you don’t even have to click a “New poll” link, because the actual homepage is a new poll. To create your poll, the only button you have to actually click is “Create poll” that will take you directly to the poll URL, which you can then share to friends, on Reddit or on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

The lack of clicking is striking – while other poll apps might require you to click a button to add more poll options, StrawPoll.Me automatically suggests a new one after you fill the first 4 options. Very nice.

2. StrawPoll.Me does offer a number of advanced options. Allowing multiple poll choices will allow… exactly that! Two options that prevent duplicate voting let you either ignore checking when multiple votes are entered from the same location or require voters to solve a CAPTCHA, a short test that will verify that your voters are humans. You’ve probably seen it around the web and StrawPoll.Me offers this widely accepted option for your polls as well.

If you’re not yet ready to publish your poll, you can “save it” for later. While Dan has said that a future version of StrawPoll.Me will include user account, the current 2.1 versions gives you the option of saving the URL of the poll as a draft – that you can revisit in the future. The nice thing about these Draft polls is that you can publish multiple polls in the future, based on the same poll.

3. When you end up creating your poll, StrawPoll.Me will give you its URL. You can then either share the URL or embed the app in a blog post or website.

Because StrawPoll.Me doesn’t have user accounts, results of polls are visible to anyone. This very transparent option is something that surely makes the service a better choice in most Redditor’s eyes. Along with the number and percentage for each option, StrawPoll.Me shows a simple graph with all the data. Just click on “Results” or add a /r to the URL of any poll.

What Would You Add?

While StrawPoll.Me is a simple poll app, which is why people love it, it doesn’t mean that Dan doesn’t accept suggestions in how to improve his creation. On a hosted response forum on Github, you can add new requests, issues and report bugs as well. It will require you, unlike StrawPoll.Me, to register with Github!

Some of these features might also be themes, an enhancement Dan has said he is going to consider for future versions of StrawPoll.Me. With its focus on core functionality, stability and user experience, Dan has created a popular poll service that outshines other similar services, filled with “features” and lacking StrawPoll.Me simple user interface.