What I’ve learned so far about polling in sequence
In this article, I will present the best way I have found so far to make a poll in sequence.
Polling in sequence is the term I adopted for activities in which it is necessary to obtain repetitive feedback in a remote workshop.
Attention!
This is an independent article and was based on my experience and practice in planning and facilitating workshops.
Since April 2020, when we started doing remote lean inception workshops, we had to adapt several of the practices, understanding, experimenting and improving the techniques and technological resources available.
One of the activities of remote lean inception is the technical, business and UX review, in which all the attention is turned to the facilitator, who has to take each of the features raised and go over the matrix of understanding and the table of business, effort and ux.
Understand a little more about this activity here.
Now, imagine a workshop with 10 to 15 participants, in which it is not always possible to have all the cameras on.
In this activity, we look for feedback, participation and alignment, and that is where everything gets tough, because it takes a lot of energy from both the facilitator and the participants. It was there that I decided to look for and experiment with various techniques and tools to run this activity in the remote context.
The best option! Quiz maker
Totally free tool, easy to set up and full of interesting features, it has proven to be one of the best options for our case study. In minutes it is possible to create the tool for voting in the session, in addition to being responsive, which allows participants to follow the facilitation by computer and optionally make the vote by smartphone.
Zoom
It was one of the best suited to the technical review case, it is quick to activate and easy to interact with, everything happens through a window that appears for each of the participants.
In Zoom, everything has to be created before the start of the session, which can make the process plastered.
Mural or Miro
Both offer polling tools, all through a session open by the facilitator.
It works very well for a simple vote, but for the review of features in which we will have a polling session in sequence, often with 20 or 30 features the task ends up becoming very exhausting and not at all productive.
In the case of the mural, it is not possible to limit the elements to be voted on the panel, different from Miro where we can define which elements can or cannot be voted on and it is also possible to define a time limit for voting.
Other Tools
I've already done tests with sli.do, directpoll, easypolls, google meet, google forms, and they all work very well in cases of single poll, without repetition, for technical review as needed, they were not effective. The highlight here is the Mentimeter which is very complete and easy to use and for my case study, I would have to use the paid version.
I hope this article helps facilitators find their own style of running remote polling activities in sequence, regardless of the tools used, it is very important to think about the outcome of the activity, the people who are participating (and who may have some restrictions) to result in a lighter workshop, focusing on what really matters.
The best option I found was to use Quiz-Maker.
Have you tried any of these tools or techniques? Comment here, what is your experience, what tool have you used, what worked or not?
