Making Directions Plain and Simple
Fix the directions on the Polling screen. I use poll everywhere during conferences and everyone is always confused by the directions for texting. Its wordy and backwards.
Can you make it simple:
TEXT: 12453
Message: Your answer
We do get this request from time to time. And, I promise we understand. But, there’s some reasons for this. One of the reasons for the wordiness is that we want to draw the eye of the participant to the instructions and shorter phrases can have people miss it. Another reason is when we were founded this is how SMS worked! Back in 2009 you had to enter the body of the message and then the number. And, while this convention is mostly gone it is dangerous to change such an integral part of how we work. In short, there’s a legacy for it.
There are a few recommendations I always give to folks who do not like our instructions. First, a reassurance that most concerns are handled by the presenter verbally describing the process in much more detail that we can do in writing. Next, if you are using our PowerPoint integration then there’s one or two things you can do:
1. We always recommend having an introduction or instructions slide before our polls to get people ready for it. We have an example for this that you can download at polleverywhere.com/presenter-notes
2. You can actually resize our poll display in PowerPoint, hide our instructions and write your own! Our PowerPoint integration will allow you to have text boxes and other objects on the same slide as our poll. We have some step by step instructions for how this works here: http://polleverywhere.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/742254