Index poll results by question

[tim]

Title:
Index poll results by question

Area:
polls

Summary:
Make it easy to view which users answered each poll question a particular way.

Description:
In this problem description I'm only going to talk about polls consisting of checkbox questions. It's possible to extend this idea to radio-button or text-entry questions, too.

Currently, poll answers are indexed by username: it's easy to view a list of all the users who answered a given poll, along with a list of the boxes they checked. I want to be able to view, for each checkbox, a list of users who checked it. So suppose I had a poll like:

Check all you like:
- walnuts
- cashews
- hazelnuts

Right now, the results would look like:
user foo: walnuts, hazelnuts
user bar: cashews, hazelnuts
user quux: walnuts

I want to be able to click on "walnuts" and see "foo, quux"; "hazelnuts" and see "foo, bar"; and "cashews" and see "bar".

I'm imagining this as an AJAX-y "click to expand" sort of widget.

The rationale: I often post a checkbox poll consisting of a single question with 20-50 checkboxes. It's very hard to get any meaningful information out of the results. It would be good to have the options to *both* ask "what boxes did user foo check?" (as you can do now) and "who checked off 'walnuts'?"

Poll #2285 Index poll results by question

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 55

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
51 (92.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (7.3%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[vampwillow]

"pivot table"

[tim]

Or we could just allow full SQL queries on poll results; I'd be fine with that too!

[triadruid]

The summary results answer 'how many checked walnuts', which is of course what it's designed to do. To get which users checked walnuts, I would use the Highlight feature of my browser on the word 'walnuts'.

[tim]

Yes; I'm suggesting an improvement to the design.

[crystalpyramid]

Implementing this feature would solve the most annoying problem I've always had with LJ's poll system. It's especially clunky when your poll options are a sentence or more long — then your list of what each person picked is so long as to be really hard to read.