Of all of the services that we offer as part of our online contest software, it is our secure voting process and user verification that set us apart.

Settling on a user-friendly, safe and easy voting method has not been easy, though. In fact, since our launch in late December, we've made two major improvements to it, and completely redesigned the "look" of the process twice as well.

We thought it would be fitting to share a little "behind the scenes" of how our newest voting flow came to be. First, a little history, provide by our Senior Architect, Steven Wittens:

All of Strutta is built on top of the open source Drupal system. This is a popular platform that runs some of the most trafficked sites on the web. In particular, we use the Drupal Voting API module to tabulate our votes, which is a tried and true solution. The code for all of this is freely available at Drupal.org for review.

On top of Drupal's own high quality code, we add some additional measures to ensure fairness.  Firstly, we require all accounts to be signed up with a valid (and verified) e-mail address, and we have several safeguards in place to prevent abuse of common e-mail services. Secondly, our entry browsing system equalizes exposure for all contest entries, regardless of when they were added. When we present random entries to content voters, our system prioritizes those entries that have been viewed the least. Thus everyone gets a fair share of exposure, and the benefit you get from submitting early is minimized.

With a few notes about how this has been implemented on our site for the latest version of the voting process, here's Senior Developer Mike Holly:

Our users are required to verify their accounts (by clicking an activation link sent in an email) before voting. In an effort to streamline the registration process as much as possible, and provide "instant gratification" to our users, we initially decided to record all votes immediately. However, as users often failed to verify their accounts, unconfirmed votes were removed from the system after a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, this led to a great deal of confusion amongst our users, as decreases in vote counts were perceived as errors in the system.

We're glad to announce that we have resolved these usability issues and have run the new system through extensive usability tests. With the new system, anonymous users must still register when voting or submitting entries, but, this time around, all new votes and entries are kept in a "pending" state until the user clicks the email verification link. When the verification link is clicked, the user is notified that their votes have been made permanent and finally redirected back to the contest site. Once at the site, the user can clearly see that their vote has been recorded. We're hoping that these changes help make our system as transparent and usable as possible.

Thank you Mike, for that very clear and candid explanation. Even with all of this carefully considered development and execution, our system still needs a "front end;" what we in the internet business refer to as the "user experience. Tha masterful artist behind what you see in this most excellent voting process is none other than Ross Howard-Jones. Here's "HoJo" with a few words about the look and feel:

We really wanted to clean up the login/register iframe (the registration box that appears) within our competition platform to help with user flow and clarity. The first version wasn't quite as flexible as we needed it to be. We kept on running into issues of the size of the iframe, so one one the first things we improved was to have the iframe expandable.

The second was the look of the iframe. The design was simple, but still felt out of place when initiated within one of the unique themes that our users had come up with. We needed something that would work well across the board with all of the themes. We came up with a even simpler design that incorporates transparencies to blend with the theme behind it. This seems to keep the user's experience more seamless.

The last thing was to improve not only the language within the iframe but also position of the copy to make everything more obvious to the user. The user's actions now flow together to make everything feel a bit more linear and supported.

So you can see that a great deal of work and preparation go into something that is meant to seem intuitive and easy. That's the challenge; building a tool that is accessible to all levels of internet users, and that is low-friction for people to enter contests and cast their votes.

We've also been asked several times about "single sign-on" for member sites, and other methods of verifying identity  and we are exploring all of them, especially for our pending API.

We're pleased with this latest iteration of the voting process, but we know it's not likely the last change we'll ever make. As always, we invite your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments, or hit us up using our contact info below.

And as always, you can follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/strutta.

The NHL (National Hockey League), who controls all online operations for the entire league including all team sites, is using Drupal-based sites for its All Star fan balloting, fan favorite awards and "Greatest Captain Sweepstakes."

The seemingly omniscient Boris Mann forwarded me a link this morning to Dries Buytaert's post, and it seems the three of us agree; this is a huge endorsement for Drupal as a CMS. At Strutta, we consider it something of a badge of honour (if indirectly) for our own work, since our contest platform is based on none other than the aforementioned open source CMS. Looks like great minds think alike. 

If Mr. Bettman or his CTO happen to be reading this, I'll also humbly mention that our product is architected, developed, optimized and designed by some of the world's finest Drupal Jedis (you know, in case you ever feel like throwing us a bone like the fan video contests, etc. We're up to the task).

Last night around dinner time we launched a voting widget for BostonPizza.com's Designer Pizza Sale, where voters choose their favorite of six new pizza recipes and are entered to win free pizza for a year. You can also receive a free appetizer from Boston Pizza if you join their email club.  

In a later post, we'll dissect the functionality of everything we built, and for now I'll simply say that the whole thing is hosted by us, and is nested on the Boston Pizza site in an iframe.

In the meantime I thought I would just share these screens along with a few words about voting, because if you're reading this before November 8, 2008, there's still time to enter! Oh, and don't miss the "Share with a Friend" button on the bottom left. 

When you first visit the voting "page" you see the six pizzas rotating around in a circle, with changing perspective as they come into the foreground. I know what you're thinking, but no- there is no flash, and you can tell because it loads almost instantly (We'll have the smart dudes explain the javascript magic later.When you click any pizza, it rotates to the very foreground, along with a description for that pizza:

When you're convinced that you've found your fave, you click the "Vote for this Pizza" bubble and then you see the form:

For me, the best part happens AFTER you vote. A colored pie chart showsyou the results of the nationwide vote. At the time of the posting, the Canadian Classic was enjoying a healthy lead, but not a majority government. 

This is the first of many examples of Strutta-powered contests that we'll be featuring over the next little while, and I will make good on that promise to share more details of the technology that makes this all possible very soon, with the help of one of our (presently very busy) developers. 

Thanks for voting! If you have any feedback about this or future contests sites, feel free to leave it in the comments below. 

Do you remember checking under the cap of your pop bottle to see if you'd won?

Those contests and promotions did exactly what they were meant to do; they motivated you to open the bottle. But like mass media advertising, the system was flawed, in that it couldn't be accurately measured. Sody pop companies could tell you exactly how many lid liners were returned for prizes, but not how many were checked overall. I know this, because as a young convenience store employee, I would fill the slow time checking under the caps of the returned empties in hopes of winning a cash prize or a Dr. Pepper sweatband. Worse yet, they didn't know how many went unchecked; junked or recycled without a last minute intervention by a greedy gas jockey with dirty fingers.

Big soda pop has adapted though, and now has the wisdom to use the bottle caps to drive traffic to the web, where every unique contest enterer can be counted and graphed, thereby giving the advertiser a better idea of the reach and success of a promotion. Now, with this new "social web," technology has lowered the barriers to making user-generated content (can we rename that term, please? Srsly) a part of the DNA of contests. Photo contests, video submissions and countless other media-related entries (design your own pop bottle, anyone?) have taken the place of the "25 words or less on a plain sheet of paper" of old.

With this new territory comes new challenges as well. Not everyone has the know-how to submit a video to an online contest, but opting into a web form and casting a vote is easy enough, if the motivation is there. Ensuring that only humans have the ability to submit to these promotions presents another problem- if the system is gamed by bots, then the integrity of the promotion is comprimised. 

Building a platform for these kinds of promotions that satisfies all those needs is the hard part. How does an advertiser best open themselves up to user-submitted media, online voting and marketing of its contests? What technologies should they use, and what kinds of steps are necessary for the legal and fraud prevention side? How will hosting be handled? Voting, judges or random draws? And how can you "get it on Facebook and the blogs?" 

Strutta's upcoming feature-set release aims to answer all of those questions right out of the gate, and here's why we're confident that advertisers and marketers will embrace it:

(Because) There is a lot more value in having some level of lasting engagement with the people opting into your promotions, especially when they are willing to create media on your behalf in order to participate.

The finalists in a photo competition, for example, would make for a more interesting and deeper site visit experience for an entrant than having no reason to check back with a contest site at all. It's with this in mind I'm sure that companies started asking us about when Strutta would be made available for them to structure promotions on their own terms. We listened, and now that technology is just a few short weeks away from launching.

If you're curious about what's "under the hood" of this latest release, I'll explore that (and touch upon a few feature details) in an upcoming post. If you have questions you'd like to ask now, feel free to hit up the commnent form below or email me directly: jordan[at]strutta.com.

Image source: Pop bottles by Dawn-ny.

All is quiet at Strutta HQ these days; it is reminiscent of a few months back when were all pushing to release our initial beta.

Long periods of focussed quiet are contrasted periodically by high-energy whiteboard sessions, as the talented development team and the dilligent (and handsome!) marketing staff work together in blissful harmony toward a common end goal. It's enough to bring a tear to your eye really, or maybe I just love what I do too much. 

The research that Mark has conducted on Strutta's behalf has turned up some interesting patterns and similarities between the new product we're building, reality tv shows and even the current US Presidential race. 

Actually, the differences are more telling. The finale of American Idol on one night draws more votes than any one presidential candidate on election day. Meanwhile, our research around online contests has highlighted the importance of prizes for both participants and voters, with the former seeming easier to attract than the latter. There is very little at stake for a voter that calls or texts their support for a reality show candidate, so why the huge numbers there? 

We're willing to conclude that technology is a major factor. Proving that mobile technology is the way of the "future," text messages are almost certainly tipping the scales considerably. In actual fact, the ability to vote from one's home, regardless of the technology, makes it a low threshold to participation. So the comparison isn't fair, but it's still fun to make it.

The participants of the current election aren't foolish enough to ignore this fact, either. As I write, I'm waiting for word of Barack Obama's running mate; an announcement he has vowed to make via text message. Not on TV, or on the front page of a printed newspaper, but on your cell phone. Even that crusty old John McCain is riding this new wave of technology and has started reading emails; I've heard he entertains a digest of them in printed form from his advisors each morning. Careful there, future boy!

So what does this mean for the new version of Strutta? It means that we recognize that companies, their fans, contest enterers, agencies, marketers and everyday web surfers have a slieu of different needs and interests when it comes to online contests and competitions, and we have to be prepared to accomodate them all. Additionally, we've had to prepare ourselves to advise as to what formula is most likely to work best with any one market, based on the trends we've noticed in the habits of participants.

As part of our Fall launch of what we're unofficially calling "Version 2," we'll be announcing a list of "Launch Partners," a number of companies whose online contests and promotions will be released along with our new software. Each will have its own unique approach to prizing and participation, and should help to exhibit the flexibility of what we're building. We've already made arrangments with a number of partners, but there's still time to be a part of this program (in which we are waving the cost of development for participants). Just fill out the form at the end of the post where we announced it, and we'll follow up with you.

If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to leave them here in the comments. 

Image source: Noise to Signal by Rob Cottingham.