Thank you all for the feedback we have received with our new poll look and feel. Overall we have had very positive feedback. The key objective was to make sure you poll stood out on your website and to ensure you had the maximum engagement with your visitors. The element where we focused on was the poll’s borders and we put a lot of our graphical expertise to come up with this new skin!.
We initially experimented with a flat yearly pricing model and found out that most of the clients were enterprise clients who wanted much more features than just an api. These clients wanted whitelabeling and we started listening… We are slowly phasing out the $59 plan because it does not meet most of the enterprise needs. Our ‘enterprise’ clients always needs some customization and we are ready to serve them. Here is our latest pricing page
Happy New Year folks!. Finally we are out with some of our cool Free API’s.
Every poll of yours will have the following new menu link showing up on the left hand side.
You will be shown a screen with all the freely available APIs which we have provided. The help icon on the screen will take you to the API documentation of the individual apis.
In summary here is the list of API’s that we have rolled out. For more detailed api documenation you can go here.
1. Vote API
Allows voting on a specific option on your poll .
2. Get Votes count API
This API lets you know the votes recieved for a particular poll and the individual votes for the poll options.
3. Get Poll Results URL API
This API will let you get the result URL for the poll. This is the URL to our famous results dashboard.
4. Get Poll Embed Code API
This API will let you get the embedded code for your poll. You can use this code script in your website or blog or wherever you want to display your poll.
5. Get Polls API
This API will return all the polls which are there in your account. You can then use the poll information wherever you wish.
6. Get All Votes API
This API will return you all the vote results for all your polls.
So HAPI APIing!
UPDATE: There is a good example of how a customer of ours uses the poll api on their home page to get customer feedback on which content (coloring pages) to publish here.
We are happy to introduce a new feature in Micropoll – Customized Preview Pages. The new menu items on your left will include the ‘Edit Preview Page’ which will lead to the page where you can change your Preview page skins. This is the page where your community interacts using the Facebook comments plugin. At this point, we have six great looking skins to help you catch the attention of your pollers. Happy Polling! - click on the image above to get a larger view of how this looks like.
We just rolled out our new poll buttons. Feedback welcome.
We are upgrading our look and feel to our side menu, it’s going to go from this look
To this :
Benefits
The next item which micropoll will be rolling out (in the coming week) is an interim version of our list. We are making this ‘leaner’ too.
Looks simple, right?. But this is a big enhancement for us, because we are removing the ‘Title’ of our polls. Check the screenshots below of what exactly we are removing and where we are removing this.
Please let us know, if you have any comments on this enhancement.
Benefits :
Screenshots
One of the simple UI Changes we did recently (last week) was to introduce a more consistent footer.
I guess, we rushed through this and made this unnecessarily ‘fat’.
Current footer (which we don’t like)
Latest ‘fatless’ footer (to be rolled out in a couple of days)
Benefits
At micropoll we are firm believers of ’increasing product agility’. This is something we keep in the back of our minds when we quickly roll out features. Product agility is a result of the team working in a ‘startup team-like’ fashion – communication is prompt, honest and features are rolled out with optimal speed and quality.
BUT, this agility sometimes costs us dearly. This is because we do not allow ourselves enough time to get to the root cause of the specific problems we’re having, and see if we can change the way we work so that we can prevent those problems from happening in the first place.
Rolling out new stuff is good, but rolling out fixes for stuff you rolled out regulary doesn’t make sense. The right mix of product agility and process improvement is what a disciplined software company should have. You don’t want processes to slow you down, but you want them to ensure that you are not reckless being ‘agile’.
Business sense is what matters the most even in Product management. Reducing ‘Product Waste’ is key here.
How do you know, how agile your software product is ?
Since I love coming up with formulas, heres one which I believe will work for software products
PRODUCT AGILITY = ( SPEED OF ROLLOUT * VALUE OF FEATURE * USER PERCEPTION OF FEATURE) / PRODUCT WASTE
Every variable in the formula above is self explanatory except for ‘Product Waste’ which I will explain in a later post.
About the author: Anup Surendran is the product manager for Micropoll. He has consulted for various technology startups in his career servicing Fortune 50 companies. He works out of Toronto, Canada and blogs frequently on his personal blog.
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