DeSu - Decentralized Survey App

sign-in page
survey screen without any surveys
create new survey screen
dashboard listing surveys
start survey screen
survey taking screen
survey completed screen
question results
survey taking screen
question results

Inspiration

As someone who has participated in a lot of surveys and had created forms for taking surveys, there’s one thing I noticed, The conventional method of survey taking-giving process is monotonous, unrewarding, and dull. There’s no motivation/rewards to fill the surveys and It’s always the one not-so-interesting task that we are burdened with.

Also, there is a lack of transparency in survey polls and results, always a chance of tampering and even big survey platform giants do not have the transparency of response that a decentralized platform running on blockchain can provide!

That's why we got the inspiration to create a Decentralized Survey App for solving these problems.

What it does

Our platform DeSu (Decentralized Survey App) reforms the whole process of taking/giving surveys by implementing many fun and unique features. It aims to do so by having its own custom ERC20 standard token called DeSuX (DSX) coin which is used to incentivize the process by awarding the participants with some of this coin, How does it work?

Basically, one thing that makes our platform (and project) unique is the ability to stake our DeSuX coin while creating surveys!! Staking coins on a survey will reward any participants completing it with some fixed amount of DeSuX (based on a per-participant basis) which they can collect over time by participating in high-profile surveys and finally redeeming it or converting it into cash.

Now the whole concept of rewards makes the process fun as well as rewarding, as we all know that human nature is to do things that benefit them therefore any normal person will target surveys with high reward returns, therefore, companies/organizations (or any survey taking authority) can exploit this by staking more of our coins and hence making their survey more lucrative and subsequently getting faster responses/more data.

But our application is a Decentralized Survey App not a Decentralized Paid Survey App (See the difference), although the ability to stake coins is what sticks us out from the crowd It’s not the only thing we offer! Since the application DeSu is built on a blockchain ledger therefore all the data going through the platform is secure and transparent for everyone to see! Therefore any normal user can post their own surveys with 0 stakes (ie a non-rewarding survey) and still collect data knowing it's all secure and has no tampering. The inherent blockchain backend ensures that there’s no tampering in data and since no third party or central server is involved therefore surveys are guaranteed to be not tampered with or modified in any way and that brings a whole new world of transparency to the table. Now that’s Sweet!

How we built it

We built it using Motoko/ReactJS, and several uncountable libraries which support the project.

Challenges we ran into

Our team due to some personal/medical issues started working late at the time of writing code we only had one week until the deadline, so learning a whole new language from scratch and creating a working prototype was hard, Not only that since Motoko was a new language there weren’t many resources as compared to many ongoing languages/platform on the internet. It took a lot of research to find code snippets and working examples to build this prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of finishing proof-of-concept work for this platform with a fully integrated frontend/backend and a presentable demonstration of the website. Not only that we are also proud of finishing all the work in a tight deadline of a week.

What we learned

We learned a lot of new things, especially the architecture of dfinity’s internet computer and how it works. We also came across actor models and new concepts of writing codes. Not only that but this project gave us a lot of exposure to how things on blockchain work and in specific how to work on internet-computer. Participating in this hackathon gave us a lot of motivation and confidence to keep working on other blockchain projects/platforms.

What's next for DeSu - Decentralized Survey App

A lot, right now the front-end for our project is a little lacking, although the backend has DeSuX stake-ing implemented our frontend didn’t have it, this was due to time constraints that we cannot implement many of our visioned features like a Wallet for getting DeSuX, reward history, and even exchanges. Not only that but we also had ideas about listing DeSuX on exchanges and hence making the cryptocurrency more useful (and lucrative) for users.

Also, we already realized long ago that since our platforms had rewards there are bound to be people that try to exploit them, so we intend to implement a bad/faulty survey response submission model using NLP/ML which checks upon the validity of submitted response using various input parameters like time taken to fill each question, difficulty, etc. Also, a captcha is a must for this application and would need to be implemented right on the network.

Made with ❤️ by HSK.