For the latest release of Poll Everywhere, we improved many small but important details. The most visible of these improvements are in the charts. During Brad’s time at NECC he noticed that a lot of presenters didn’t change the default poll settings, making the charts unreadable in larger rooms. In response to this problem we made the text message voting keywords appear in the chart area, which comfortably allows all text in the chart to be bigger.

Our customers asked for clear and visible voting instructions, and a way to show that votes are being received without exposing the popular choice too soon.  Therefore we also added a “Hide Results” button. This view shows the options that the audience can respond to as well as a real-time running total of the responses.

For customers subscribed to our premium plans, we added a few additional variables to the custom reply message that you can configure.  When participants respond to your polls via text message or over the web, you can automatically reply with information like the total number of responses received for that poll.

Nobody likes to lose their audience’s valuable feedback.  Our polls now send their creators a short email notification if they fill up to 95% of their capacity.

A little while ago we had the opportunity to use Poll Everywhere at an event that Bob Metcalfe presented at.  Bob co-invented Ethernet, founded 3Com, and is now a partner at venture capital firm Polaris.  His only suggestion was that the error messages weren’t clear enough, so we made them smarter.  They will be much more intuitive to our web, smartphone, and SMS voters.  Smarter error messages make for a less confusing experience if a user responds to a poll incorrectly.

We figured Bob was worth listening to.  So are you!  Tell us what you need, and we just might build it.