This fall I was talking to a group of professors at Notre Dame about where Poll Everywhere is headed. When I mentioned, “we have a bunch of really cool features planned for you,” one gentlemen spoke up and said, “No! I like Poll Everywhere just how it is! Its so easy to create a poll!” After talking more to this professor I discovered that he was not adverse to new features; rather, he didn’t like how old-school software vendors bolt more features onto their product without any regards of the feature staying out of the way.

On top of that, Jeff pointed out that our design took up way too much screen real estate on 1024 x 768 resolution screens; in fact, our old design used up so much space that it became known internally as the “Cadillac” design. The day of reckoning for our old design came when we started to build poll sharing features; our old design simply wasn’t working anymore. A few weeks later, “Brevity” was born.

Our new design (internally referred to as “Brevity”) focuses on making every single pixel count while maintaining the purity and simplicity that you’ve come to expect from Poll Everywhere. This new interface will allow us to deliver more powerful features that stay out of the way when you don’t need them. A great example of such a feature is the ability to download multiple polls into one PowerPoint presentation. This seems very simple on the surface but, truth be told, we went through a lot of pains behind the scenes to get this working.

Lets dive into a few areas that we’ve improved for Poll Everywhere:

Content Sharing & Search

We’ve been listening to our higher education customers and they want to be able to share questions with other professors in their section or department. With a premium Poll Everywhere account, you can browse all the polls on your account and copy them. To maintain privacy, you can not see the results of the other person’s question.

It would be really tough to share content with others without a good search interface so we’ve added search throughout lists of polls.

Context Sensitive User Interface Elements

We built our user interface so it stays out of the way until you need it. All of our page designs have been optimized for readability which meant getting rid of superfluous design elements. We took this to such a level of detail that we removed underlines from hyperlinks because they didn’t aid discerning what was clickable and what wasn’t (everything is clickable!)

Participants

We promoted “participants” to a first class feature so you can see who said what. To respect the privacy of folks in the audience, they have to give permission to specific presenters before their responses can be identified.

We have a bunch of great features lined up that are going to change how people think about audience response systems; but we strongly believe you can’t just “throw” new features into a product. The design and placement is just as important, if not more important than the feature itself. After all, what good is new functionality in software if you can’t use or can’t find it?