Closing the gap on Slack surveys and polls with templates & dialogs

Polly is bringing polling and surveys to the next level in Slack

Let's imagine that you're in your Slack team's engineering channel and everyone just got a poll asking for feedback on the most recent Sprint Retrospective meeting -- but none of the options the author has given you are on par with your opinions and there is no easy way to add comments, answer open-endedly, or add in your option without being booted off to the web interface.

On the other end, the Senior Product Manager wants his survey creation to be even more simple but is only limited to 3 pre-existing templates or he has to manually create recurring surveys.

Today, that all changes… and that's just the beginning of it.

Aside from our brand new, sparkly website redesign, we've got a lot of exciting features in store that makes your polling and survey experience in Slack feel even more seamless.

Here's what's new

A few months ago, we launched support for message menus that gives users enhanced ability to schedule polls, without the context switching and more interaction.

As mentioned previously, our core design philosophy is to make sure every message from Polly feels alive. We're taking that one step further by with the introduction of dialog functionality, a new-and-improved survey interface, and survey templates.

Opening up a conversation with commenting

Up until now, we had commenting functionality but in order to comment on a poll, you were redirected off to the web to do so. With Slack's introduction of dialogs, a new Slack feature to build interactive forms outside the context of a channel, you can now comment on polls and surveys all within Slack.

Full authoring experience with dialogs - all in Slack

Gone are the days of typing out long multiple choice options with the cumbersome quotation requirement - now you can easily add whatever options you please, directly in Slack. That's right - no more context switching or having to read through to make sure you didn't forget a quotation mark. Isn't it just so much more visually appealing?

You can ask open-ended questions, or give your team the power to add their own options on polls. Forget having to candidly ask open-ended questions in the channel and tracking what your team says -- you can now do that in a much more structured and organized way.

Is something not working quite like you were expecting, or want to just give us some awesome feedback? Now, you can leave us feedback with the dialog input functionality, without having to navigate our website to report issues. Just message the Polly bot directly with /polly feedback, and you can submit your feedback with the dialog box popup.

Fire off survey templates - no additional work required

Want to create a particular recurring survey but don't want to put in the effort to create it? Luckily for you, we've come up with commonly used survey templates (and we will always be creating more!) where you can easily just send off without having to do any extra work. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

You can use one from our ecosystem of pre-made templates, whether you're in HR, an engineer, a Slack community manager, or just need a survey that will organize your team's input to plan your next Happy Hour social. Every part of the pre-made template can be modified to whatever floats your boat - edit, add, or remove our questions (no hard feelings!), make it anonymous, or on a different recurrence schedule.

If you just want to save your old surveys as a template, you can do that too! We try to give you surveys that include everything you need, but no one does it better than you. All your saved templates will live in a library where you can come back to and use over and over.

How we're changing the game for polls and surveys in Slack

With the ability to add comments and give feedback and a much better user experience, this finally closes the loop for Polly. The functionality of sending out polls was almost there, but didn't have the immersed experience that made it feel seamless and easy. By being fully interactive and native to the Slack experience, surveys don't feel like just another task in your workflow -- it's effortless, and feels like it's a part of your team communication minus the context switching and distraction. Because of this quick and effortless interaction, we're seeing users much more engaged and a much higher participation rate across teams.

Give Polly a chance

If you try us out and love it, let us know! Or do you see gaps in the user experience that could be improved? Even better! Let us know about that as well. We're always looking for ways to improve your experience and make your life easier.