Poli.sh - presenter feedback system

This is a story about creation of an effective MVP (minimum viable product) with responsive design in 20 days.

Initial Contact

We liked the client from the first glance from his descriptions on Elance. We always lacked this kind of tool after trainings and presentations to leave and receive feedback in a convenient way. At the same time our experience looked convincing for Kurt, as we’ve already finished several MVPs with responsive layout. Moreover, from the very beginning we showed him a skeleton of his project: it takes us about half an hour to come up with it due to Ironcoder we built to automatize this routine part of work.

I will not tire you with the long and specific requirements we were lucky to have, and just retell the main points.

Poli.sh is a presenter feedback system which enables:

• register and sign in with email and Twitter
• create a presenter's profile with contact information and beautiful URL
• gather anonymous and personalized feedback to different events and manage them
• offer to share the feedback on Twitter
• find presenters and their events, and quickly leave feedback
• subscribe for updates

Functional demo

Having polished the skeleton we prepared while bidding, we came up with a few suggestions, including Twitter registration and creating events models from the very beginning. By the way, Kurt really liked the Django admin panel, which is created automatically with each project build. Yes, Django is cool:)

This is how the project structure looks:

And these are the pages of our functional demo. Not beautiful yet, but using those functional demo pages we were able to test all the flow.:

Layout Design

To provide responsive layout, we used Twitter Bootstrap. We highly recommend this technology (or similar, like Foundation, etc) to start from. It allows having working layout in all modern browsers without investing a lot of resources. It also has a list of themes that helps differ from the crowd.

This part took us several days to implement. There are some screens of polished pages.

Final Polishing and Deployment

It took us several days to polish Poli.sh, pun intended, and complete all the final requests of Kurt.

When deploying, we suggest using DigitalOcean as a hosting provider. It suits well Django projects. You could have $5-10/month plan when you are small and increase in 30 minutes to big machine when gaining big bunch of users from Reddit or TechCrunch.

We deployed the code to customer server and of course made production setup. We also configured Nginx/MySQL/Django/Supervisor.

One more request from customer was to setup SSL, as it increases site credibility. So now you can access the site with the following address: https://poli.sh.

Real work usage

The project has twitter account: @trypolish where you can see all activity of the project.

For example, here is a photo from conference where poli.sh is being used:

Final notes

We have made a page for 7WebPages ourselves - poli.sh/7webpages. Please visit it, leave feedback for our work quality and help us polish our skills!

Kurt is satisfied - we are happy!

"Yuri and team did a terrific job. Responsive and great communication. With their experience they were able to provide several recommendations that exceeded expectations."

Kurt on Elance about 7WebPages

Second iteration of Polish

The next part implied the following builds up:

• creating "managers". These users can add users to their team, review their feedbacks
• Stripe payment system integration
• access to statistics (percentage of positive and negative feedbacks by teams and people)
• word cloud of the most often used words in the feedbacks
• and some other minor changes