Revamping Poll Everywhere's Presentation Controls

End-to-End Design to Production | Visual Design | UX Design | Competitive & UX Research

poll everywhere's old and new presentation controls

Overview | Challenge

Redesigning a product core feature

Poll Everywhere is a live audience engagement tool that allows presenters to connect with their audience via polls, Q&A’s and other types of activities. A core part of the functionality is the set of presentation controls that allows presenters to manage their polls and presentation. They can lock a poll so it no longer registers responses, navigate to other polls within a group and reset a poll by clearing all received responses. Importantly, presenters also use the controls to switch between different views of a poll. For example, they can choose when to simply show the poll question or show responses to the poll or even show correct answers if applicable.

The existing presentation controls were large buttons that covered users’ presentations. In addition, controls did not function in a responsive manner and some features were not apparent to presenters. Finally the controls looked quite dated and needed a refresh.

This project involved redesigning and shipping Poll Everywhere’s new presentation controls, a critical part of the product’s user experience.

Role

Lead product designer

At Poll Everywhere, we work in small cross-functional teams with one designer. I was the lead product designer on the presentation controls project and responsible for end-to-end design to production. My work included UX and competitive research, design iteration, usability testing and QA once the controls were shipped. My colleagues on this project were a product manager, a front-end architecture lead and a full-stack engineer. This project was 3 months in duration.

Product context

Poll Everywhere: where is it being used and by whom?

Poll Everywhere is used in a variety of settings, with the majority being:

  • Corporate settings: from small team meetings to professional development training to company townhalls to large conferences.
  • Universities and educational settings: professors or teachers use the product to test their students’ understanding of course work and field Q&As during class or at academic conferences.

Scope

More than just presentation controls

The presentation controls are displayed both when a presenter is displaying a full screen poll to an audience (full screen presentation mode), as well as on the activity detail screen.

The activity detail screen is where presenters can adjust settings on a poll, such the poll’s visual style, set a timer that controls the length of question’s response time (which will appear in full screen presentation mode) and set other variables. Presenters can “activate” a poll from the activity detail page, so users can answer poll questions asynchronously at the presenter’s Poll Everywhere response URL without presenting the poll. Presenters can also use the controls to traverse a folder of questions they set up by navigating forward and backwards.

For the activity detail page, various pieces of functionality from the controls correspond with functionality in the configuration sidebar menu. That meant I needed to redesign the entire activity detail page layout, the configuration panel and the controls functionality, as well as ensure a similar set of controls functioned well for full screen presentation mode.

Below is a simplified user journey to show where the activity detail page fits within the presentation creation process.

user journey

Research phase

UX and competitive research

There are several other live audience engagement tools on the market, so I reviewed our competitors' tools to understand what patterns they had implemented given their feature set.

I also reviewed controls from presentation software, like Pitch, as well as live meeting software such as Zoom to learn about UX patterns that were implemented in live audience contexts.

post-its map of existing information architecture

Early designs

Functionality across user journey

Early on, the designs were very exploratory. I created many design directions for both the activity detail page, as well as the full presentation screen. I explored different button layouts, UX copy, icons and various page layouts for both the activity detail page and full screen presentation mode. On the activity detail page, I also explored how to reorganize the same pieces of functionality from the controls within various layouts that mimicked designing a slide, similiar to presentation software like Keynote or Pitch.

>On both the activity detail page and full screen presentation mode, I explored:

  • how users view previous and upcoming poll questions in a folder
  • how to lock a poll so it cannot receive more responses
  • setting a timer for response time limits
  • depending on the type of poll, switching views to show poll questions, responses and correctness
  • how to set the visual “look and feel” of a poll
  • clearing responses (reset the poll question and remove responses)
  • in full screen presentation mode, I also explored exiting a presentation.
user journey
A few examples of exploratory designs for the activity detail page.
user journey
A few examples of exploratory designs for full screen presentation mode.

Scope change

Narrowing the product feature for shipping

Part way through the research and design phase, the scope for the project changed. Normally for bigger projects like this one, we work on the designs, pair with product managers and engineers and then split various parts of the functionality into discrete projects that would be built in 6-week phases and finally shipped to customers once the feature was completed. In this case, we were working in the middle of the pandemic and due to other priorities, we would only ship the controls in full screen presentation mode, with a partial solution for the activity detail page. Overhauling the rest of the functionality on the activity detail screen, like a new configuration panel and layout would be pushed out indefinitely. The timer redesign also would not be included, though I had a chance to work on that later. The presentation controls would get shipped, but would standout on the activity detail page in particular because the rest of the layout would not be updated.

Usability testing

Testing UI patterns and user flows

With the scope change, I focused my attention on the controls in full screen presentation mode. After solidifying a design, I would test it on Usability Hub to determine if users could complete certain tasks and test if they comprehendeded the functionality. A key part of the tests: determine if testers understood the functionality of buttons based on their context, placement, icon and labels. I set up scenarios and tasks to understand testers' expectations when clicking on different buttons.

Not surprisingly, icon-only buttons were hard to comprehend with both stock and custom icons. Moreover many of presenters do not use our tool even on weekly-basis, so expecting them to remember the functionality of icon-only buttons was asking a lot of them. These insights suggested that the buttons with icons needed to be paired with labels. It turns out buttons with icons and labels performed much better. I also tested various designs for each poll type. Each question type has slightly different controls to pair with their different features. For example, a poll that requires users to click on part of an image to answer a question has different controls than a multiple choice question.

3 main user research insights
A few examples from the 30+ usability tests I conducted.

Results

Successful shipped designs

After many tests of the presentation controls for each poll type and getting feedback from engineering and product colleagues, I finally had a set of controls that were ready for my engineering colleagues to start building. Per our usual process, I would be working with engineers and reviewing/testing each component as it was being built.

Our goal at the end of the many months-long project was to ship the new controls to new users, as well as to existing paid and free customers who had solid presentation rates. However due to competing internal priorities due to the pandemic, we had to delay the external ship date a few months. In the meantime, we shipped the feature internally to get company-wide feedback. Finally - the presentation controls were shipped to the public 3 months later to much success. CSAT scores from customers showed a 21% lift in terms of customer satisfaction with the new controls over the old controls.

sketches of various screens
From production: Shipped presentation controls.

Ongoing updates

Feature iteration

Over the course of many other projects, my design and engineering colleagues and I worked on overhauling the entire Product’s information architecture and navigation. Within those larger structural changes, we were also finally able to make deeper changes to the activity detail page layout within the context of the new information architecture and new primary and secondary navigation bar patterns, which you can see below. Further changes to the configuration panel would have to wait until we could find more time on the Product Roadmap.

sketches of various screens
Further product updates of the activity detail page in the context of updated product IA and navigation patterns.