Category Archives: New Features

Auto-number Custom Keywords

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Sometimes it’s the little conveniences that make web sites a joy to work in.

If you’re on some of our paid plans you get to choose your keywords. It’s common to use some acronym (perhaps your company, group, or conference initials) for keywords, followed by numbers.

Let’s say you are interested in other people’s business. Let’s say you work as part of the National Society Affirming, “Privacy Rights Is So Mundane”. You might want to make a poll like this:

auto_keyword_results

In the past you had to type in each keyword separately. We had someone call last week who needed 300 choices on a single poll (and believe it or not, this happens frequently). Data entry is no fun. So now, if you set the first keyword to be letters followed by a number, and the rest of your keywords are just auto-keywords, we’ll just auto-number the rest for you following your pattern.

HOPE1 -> HOPE1, HOPE2, HOPE3, HOPE4, etc
MPIWEC1 -> MPIWEC1, MPIWEC2, MPIWEC3, etc
P200 -> P200, P201, P202, etc

auto_keyword

It’s a very simple feature, but a great time-saver.

WARNING: Mad Scientists Take Over Poll Everywhere

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IT’S ALIVE!

Gene Wilder in Young FrankensteinIntroducing Poll Everywhere Labs–where our mad scientists animate new life.

Compelled by dark forces beyond their control, Poll Everywhere’s team of radical engineers have concocted schemes beyond your wildest imagination to make your presentations fantabulous, incredible, or just plain NOT BORING.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s currently alive available.  Remember, all these features are in Beta, so this stuff can change, break, or decompose disappear at any time.  

Discourses:  allow your audience to vote on free text responses.  Perfect for brainstorming and large Audience Q&A.

Simple Keywords:  allow your live audience to vote with A, B, C etc on multiple choice polls; and without entering a keyword prefix for free text polls.  Note that this product does not currently work with Twitter.

HTML5 Polls:  watch our progress as we move to a flashless world.

Poll Sorting:  Choose how to sort polls within groups on your My Polls page.

Copy Entire Groups of Polls:  great for copying surveys and reducing data entry overhead for conferences asking the same set of questions after many breakout sessions; or by educators using similar questions in multiple sections.

(Not)Boring Mode:  Where the dark yet playful imaginations come out to play.  See hidden funny surprises around our site.

If you dare, visit Poll Everywhere Labs and let us know:  Which creatures features are you most excited about trying?

And in the meantime….

Warning: This Will Make You Hungry (for more Polling)

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Here at Poll Everywhere, we are absolutely dependent on our mobile phones. We check email on the go, read the news when we first wake up in bed, work and play (patiently) while waiting in line, and sometimes even make or take a call.

Like everyone else, we love beautiful design.  Lots of companies focus on making a site beautiful first, and often run out of time for things like function and scalability. That’s not us. Our number one goal is to make a product that you know you can trust in the most demanding of presentation situations. So for a long time the look and feel of our mobile experience was of secondary importance, and that was painful, even to us.  We’d “dogfood” our releases (that’s startup talk for using our product) and cringe. Now that we’ve finished the new mobile functionality such as on-the-fly poll creation, moderation, etc; we finally got to turn our attention to making things beautiful.

Wait, you might be thinking, didn’t Poll Everywhere just release a new presenter tool for mobile?  Yes, yes we did.  (Thanks for paying attention, and if you haven’t seen that blog post, please check it out, because it’s HOT STUFF). So what’s new? If the previous mobile release was the steak for the presenter, this mobile release is all about the sizzle for the audience. Below you’ll see some highlights of our extreme mobile makeover.  As Jonny Ive might say at an Apple release: ”it’s our best mobile experience yet.”

Home Page

Shown automatically when visiting polleverywhere.com from any smart phone

Before: The Home Page Like a black and white movie. Classic, but still….

After: The Home Page. Like the moment when Dorothy steps into Oz after the Tornado.

 

Voting Page

Shown automatically when accessing polleverywhere.com/vote from any smart phone

Before: The Landing Page. Cryptic for new participants. URL bar reduces screen space.

After: The Landing Page. Better instructions. Less clutter. Easier to read. Removed URL Bar.

Waiting Page

Also known as Pie.  Tasty, Tasty Pie. Shown when the audience is waiting for a presenter to push a poll or start a presentation.

Before: Pie Page

After: Pie Page

Multiple Choice Polls

Our bread and butter.

Before: Multiple Choice Polls. Nice, but wow, what a snoozer. Let’s wake everybody up!

After: Multiple Choice Polls. Who wouldn’t want to participate?

Free Text Polls

Our Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

Before: Free Text Polls. Functional, but won’t win any awards.

After: Free Text Polls show all previous answers. And it’s pretty, too!

What do you think? Does this help your experience? Did this post make you hungry? Let us know in the comments!

Scheduling Polls To Automatically Start and Stop

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Scheduling polls to start and stop is one of our most commonly requested features,  and the Poll Everywhere developers have answered your call!

Effective immediately, everyone can start and stop your polls at a time they schedule in advance. Here’s how:

Step 1: Open a poll from your “My Polls Page”

Click on the Edit menu from any poll

 

Step 2:  Click “Schedule Start/Stop”  Easy as Pie!

Click

In the Edit Menu, Click on “Schedule Start/Stop”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3:  Select a relative time, or click “custom” to schedule a poll for a specific time and date

Select the time and date from the menu

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warning:

This feature is best used with Text, Twitter, or Private Web Link voting methods.  If you need to schedule a poll for use with a live audience using your pollev.com/my/pollev page, be sure to push the poll to your pollev.com page, as described here.

Go forth and schedule!  Let us know in the comments if you have any feedback.

Push: Choose Which Poll to Display on Your PollEv Page

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Push A Poll to Your PollEv Page

With the release of Mobile Presenter Tools, we introduced a completely new feature, Push. We’ve now implemented this feature on the full site as well. For those running polls directly from the site, this is a big change.

Push allows you to manually select a poll to display on your PollEv page. In the past your PollEv page would update automatically to display the poll you were currently viewing as the presenter. **Your PollEv page will still update automatically from a PowerPoint presentation or when using the Mac Presenter App.** But now you will manually select which poll you’d like to display on your PollEv page from the website or mobile app by clicking on the Push Button. Clicking the button again will remove the poll from your PollEv page.

**Note: This feature is designed to be used live. Pushed polls will only remain on your PollEv page for 3 hours by default. You can change this setting in your account’s Personal Settings.Push_timeout

Why is this better?

  • You can now leave a poll question open on your PollEv page for an extended period of time.
  • Poll participants (who have web-enabled devices) without using a projector.
  • Send warm-up or registration questions without displaying the results live.
  • Monitor polls from the website during a presentation without accidentally updating your PollEv page.

Web Audience Response System Comparison

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The Web Audience Response System Comparison Chart

Since we released the hardware comparison chart in 2008, there have been a number of notable new products in the web based audience / classroom response system space; copying and  improving on the technology we invented in 2007.  So we felt it was time to create what we believe to be the most complete Web-based Audience Response System Comparison Chart.  

Why do we risk looking bad? 

You’ll see that we don’t win on every feature, and we’re no longer always the cheapest.  So why, you might ask, do we put this out there?  We do it because we believe the following:

  • Customers should have all the facts in hand when considering a purchase of a product they’ll be using in front of a crowd of people. Even if they don’t choose us, they’ll appreciate our help.
  • Competition makes us stronger and pushes us to work harder for your business
  • Quite frankly, when you use facts to compare us against the other guys, most of the time we will come out ahead.

Some Historical Context

When we founded Poll Everywhere back in 2007, finding factual comparisons among different classroom and audience response systems was impossible.

To solve that problem we created our own hardware comparison chart that compares Poll Everywhere to the major hardware audience response system vendors on the market.    While we can’t guarantee we’re the most unbiased source in the world, we do our darnedest to be as objective and fact-based as possible.

Most of our competitors were gracious, received this chart well and even helped us correct the chart when necessary.  However, one competitor didn’t want customers to have any facts about their product placed in comparison with Poll Everywhere.  Could it be they didn’t like how they fared in a head to head comparison with a system that cost 1/10th as much?

Enjoy.  And let us know what you think in the comments.

Audience Response System Comparison

We Think We’re The Orange

P.S.  We’re human. If we missed anything, it was purely by accident. Removing bias is really hard  – we tend to see all other products through Poll Everywhere colored glasses, even if we’re trying not to. You can mention it in the comments here; or email us at hello+vs@polleverywhere.com.  We’ll do a revision within 60 days. If anyone bullies us again legally, we’ll tell you about it. Here’s to transparency!

 

Performance and Reliability: One Year Later

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Growth from July 2012 to Present

Remember last Fall when we experienced an insane amount of growth during the back-to-school rush and experienced a few outages along the way? We do, and we’ve been working non-stop over the past year to make sure that we don’t run into the same issues.

We expect at least 2x the amount of traffic over last August/September, so we planned to 4x our capacity, but ended up engineering Poll Everywhere to handle 16x of anticipated capacity.

Not only did we scale our systems up by a factor of 16, but we also run a simulation of this traffic on our servers every night. That means while you’re sleeping, we’re busy hammering on Poll Everywhere to make sure its just as fast for you as the day before.

What does all of this mean?

It means you can expect fast, reliable service from Poll Everywhere this Fall and well into the future. Not only did we meet our scaling challenges, but we have introduced several new processes in our development and operations processes to make sure we always catch problems before they become a major issue.

But we didn’t just stop there…

We give you an unprecedented view into the status of our system once every 5 seconds

The live graphs at status.polleverywhere.com give you unprecedented transparency into our app to make sure everything is working if you suspect any issues.

Its pretty common for web applications these days to indicate the status of their system’s with a traffic light: green for “everything is OK”, yellow for “we’re experiencing some minor issues”, all the way to the dreaded red, “nothing is working!” That just wasn’t good enough for us, so we took transparency to the next level by providing these live graphs to our customers so they can see how long its taking for our system to process responses.

We run at least two of everything for increased reliability

We invested a lot of time and money to make sure that we run at least two of everything in our infrastructure to make our application more reliable. If a database server catastrophically fails, you probably wouldn’t even notice as it switches over to a backup system.

If that wasn’t enough, our customer support is legendary

Did you know that when you call our customer service number a human picks up that knows the product like the back of their hand? When you send us an email, its unusual if we don’t get back to you within an hour. When things go wrong or you’re having a tough time understanding something, we put the best support at your disposal. You can call, email, or hit us up on Twitter and we’re always there to help.

What other clicker or web response company do you know that commits to that level of transparency?

New! Mobile Presenter Tools

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Poll Everywhere was built on the premise of replacing expensive proprietary ARS (Audience Response System) technology with standard mobile phone and web technology for polls. But (until now) we’ve focused more heavily on the participants in the room than the presenters; while some other solutions out there provide a good mobile experience for presenters as well. We know, so crazy!

Poll Everywhere Mobile Presenter Tools

Be a polling ninja! You now have the freedom to move about the room creating and managing existing polls from a tablet or smartphone.


Really, another app to download!?

Nope! Just go to pollev.com/present on your table or smartphone. Simples! (Don’t forget to bookmark this for later!)

Can I create new polls on the fly?

Yep. Be spontaneous!  Create new “On-the-fly Polls” based on your participants’ feedback!  You can edit, analyze and modify the polls later when you are logged into your account.

Can I start polls? Stop polls? Clear polls? Moderate polls? View results live?

Yes times five!

Wait, will I still be able to change my visual settings, response message and other advanced features on my mobile device?

Yes! You can still use your mobile device to access our regular website at www.polleverywhere.com. (You may wish to bookmark this, too.)

Speechless? Wait, there’s more: We’re also introducing a completely new feature, Push. With Push you can now choose a poll question to send to your pollev.com/reserve page! What does it mean?  You can now present polls and receive live results with ONLY SMARTPHONES OR TABLETS — no projector or laptop required!.

So visit pollev.com/presenter on your Android, iPhone, or iPad and take it for a spin!

One catch:  For now, only Safari, Android, and Firefox mobile browsers are supported.  We’ll update this page as we add more.

Edit Multiple Polls

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Edit Multiple Polls

Have you ever wanted to change the settings on a group of polls all at once? If you have then you’re probably familiar with the annoying process of going through every single poll one-by-one. That’s A LOT of clicks.

Have you ever wanted to move a poll from one account to another? If so you were probably pretty bummed when you found out you couldn’t.

Now you can! So, turn that frown upside down and check out the new “Edit Multiple” button at the top of your My Polls page.

Edit Multiple Menu Continue reading →