Quick Polls for Dynamic Signal

Dynamic Signal is an employee communications platform dedicated towards engaging and activating employees. Communication managers run these platforms and use various tools to create engaging content for employees. Surveys were communication manager's most effective way to receive feedback from employees, but it was difficult to use and achieved less than a 12% response rate on average. In June 2017, I had the chance to recreate the survey experience, working in tandem with the Product Manager leading the Content Distribution team.

The Situation

Less than 10% of customers were actively using the surveys feature due to its clunky creation flow and multi-step process to complete a survey.

Communication managers (those creating the surveys) were looking for better ways to engage their employees and receive quick pieces of feedback without creating a survey that could only be sent through an app notification.

Research & Feedback

As we explored the survey flow, and continued to hear from communication managers, we realized there were varying use cases based on the amount of simplicity vs. advanced features. An advanced survey has 10+ feature requirements whereas a simple one question survey only requires 5 of those same features.

It simply wasn't possible to make one sweeping improvement to surveys to satisfy the advanced survey use case (35% occurrence) and the simple survey use case of one or two questions (65% occurrence).

Based on the user feedback and data usage, the team decided to invest in building a new survey-type: quick polls.

Competitive Analysis

With a clear line of sight to build polls as an extension of surveys, I decided to look into a few prominent social platforms to understand what consistency standards there were for polls (if any).

While looking at polls on Twitter, Facebook, and Slack, it’s important to note that we weren’t looking to just copy best practices. Rather, we wanted to understand why those solutions were successful in context, then shift the focus back to our product based on our users needs.

Product Requirements

Before jumping into designs, I wanted to make sure I was designing for users actions and not just a technically implemented feature with some best practices that I’ve gathered. To do this, I constructed a user flow defining the ideal path for communication managers and employees to interact with polls.

The communication manager’s requirements:

Ability to ask employees a single multiple choice question

Be able to set an end date to respond to the question

Determine whether the results can be shown to employees

Be able to see who has responded and for which option

Allow responses from the news feed

The employee, on the other hand, should be able to identify this poll from the news feed, a notification message, or from an email, and take 2 or fewer steps to respond.

The Solution

The final solution to quick polls served many challenges and iterations across its creation, consumption, and distribution across platforms. Some notable challenges lied in form building, remaining consistent under native design systems, detailing user interactions and iterating off of multiple usability testing sessions, and handling the unique survey form edge cases.

Creating a Quick Poll

Answering a Quick Poll

Handling Variations in Poll Settings

Manager's Requirement to Track Results

A consistent experience to reach employees no matter what platform they're on

The Result

I'm incredibly proud of the final product which resulted in a near 65% adoption across all of Dynamic Signal's customers. There was great value in designing this feature across multiple platforms and delivery methods. Quick Polls is one of the few pieces of content in the platform that could be posted in a news feed, broadcasted out in the form of a notification, sent through email, or shared via direct messaging.

From a design perspective, this was an incredibly rewarding experience where I was able to own the complete end to end design experience from the initial problem statement to ideation, user research, crafting user flows and conducting usability testing, designing the UI across platforms, and to detailing final prototypes.