Millions of people from around the world take out their phones and respond to Poll Everywhere activities each day. It’s essential that our live visualizations are both accessible and comprehensible to diverse audiences so they can quickly give feedback to the person presenting. That’s our “magic moment” interaction that initially draws people into Poll Everywhere. As you’d expect, there are many more types of interactions design must consider. We talk about those interactions through the lens of archetypes.

Archetypes

With archetypes, we explore the best way to solve our users’ problems. We have five primary archetypes:

The five primary Poll Everywhere archetypes

The details of those archetypes:

• Presenter – Communicates in a vulnerable state in front of their peers, shares new ideas, and requests feedback. Presenting is one of the most nerve wracking activities people engage in during their professional careers; it’s our job to design that stress out of our application and make it reassuring.
• Participant – The audience. These are the people who are giving feedback to the presenter, live, during a presentation. A Participant could a student in an education setting or an HR professional at a conference.
• Creator – Crafts content and selects the optimal activity-type. It could be something as simple as a true/false question or something as complex as creating a 10 question trivia competition and distributing it to 20 Presenters.
• Event producer – Works with a team of people, backstage, supporting the presenter. For very large events, there’s usually a person backstage that works with the audio visual team that’s dedicated to Poll Everywhere.
• Account administrator – In larger organizations, these are the people who support Creators and Presenters by managing billing, user provisioning, and privileges.

We’ve found that talking about our product internally via archetypes drastically speeds up cross-functional collaboration with various teams and stakeholders.

Design system

We don’t believe design should be a priesthood or a silo; it should be accessible to anybody who needs to communicate how our product or company should look and work. Conversely, we’re also not saying everybody should be a great designer, that’s the design team’s job. Our belief is simply that everybody should be able to participate in design.

Whisk

Because of our belief that design should be inclusive, we’ve invested heavily in an atomic design system that starts with Figma. We call it Whisk.

Design system components

Product managers, designers, and engineers that work on UI or UX are all expected to know Figma because it’s where our extensive library of design tokens, elements, components, and page layouts lives. This makes it possible to very quickly and cheaply put together a mock-up or clickable prototype that conveys an idea. Showing something is much better than talking about something.

Brand website