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Doodle Unplugged: "poll on paper"

The new user management enables the subscription owner to:

• Whitelist premium users via email addresses or domains
• Automatically inform users about their Premium Doodle Business license
• View all active users of the subscription and see their usage
• Remove users and/or domains in order to free up licenses or prevent misuse

New Premium Doodle Business administration dashboard

All of the regular premium features are still a part of the package, including branding, ad-free usage for the poll initiator and all participants, efficiency options, SSL encryption, and a corporate Doodle URL. The competitive price plans remain the same and depend on the number of licenses per organization.

We also want to thank our loyal premium customers, such as Thomas Cook, GROUPE ADEO, The Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and many more associations, small companies, enterprises, educational organizations, and local and federal authorities.

They also created a video about our favorite Doodle feature, which is the integration with different calendar systems that we call Calendar Connect. They developed an easy introduction to a professional feature.

The new Mobile Doodle ensures smooth handling on the touch screen, show all relevant information concisely and features almost all of Doodle’s functionality, including:

• Create polls
• Send invitations via the mobile email client, Twitter, or Facebook
• Comment on polls
• Edit your own participation
• Close poll and pick final time
• MyDoodle dashboard
• Premium Doodle (no ads)
• Calendar connect (view your calendar data during poll creation and participation)

If you haven’t connected your calendar with Doodle yet, then the new mobile version is definitely a reason to do so because having a connected calendar simplifies both creating and answering meeting invitations due to the fact that you’ll always see when your schedule has open time slots.

The ability to select your current location as the meeting place is one of the mobile-specific features that isn’t included in the standard Web version. As an added bonus, you can also directly contact participants via telephone or email by just clicking on their names when the information was collected during the poll participation (requires Premium Doodle). This is useful when people don’t show up for a meeting or you need to change the meeting location at the last minute.

The complete mobile redesign is a natural next step because of the redesign of our standard Web version and skyrocketing mobile usage. It’s easy to see that smartphones are being widely distributed at a very high level*. We also see this in the usage of Doodle, which has had a threefold increase per year in the last two years. Not only does this change people’s communication habits, but it also shows website providers that users have clear mobile expectations. For example, our own research shows that the main usability demand of mobile users is that websites be optimized for their smartphones.

We actively support and have tested the mobile version on IE9, WebKit (iPhone, Safari, BlackBerry 6 and later, Nokia S60 and later), Opera 6 and later, and Firefox 4. We also provide native apps for the iPhone and Android.

The new design was done by virtuallyhandmade, and they’re the same company that redesigned Doodle’s standard Web version.

m.doodle.com

Poll initiate w/ optional geolocation

Date select: small bars indicate availability

Poll participation w/ calendar context

*Latest figures: Smartphone sales up 74% in Q2 2011 vs. Q2 2010 (Gartner, Inc. – August 2011)

We also launched a super basic desktop version of Doodle’s participation page that can be helpful if you use an older browser that doesn’t support the regular Doodle user interface. With this version, you can always be 100% sure that everyone will be able to answer a Doodle invitation no matter what software they use.

Users in Switzerland might also see a new form of advertising because we’re now experimenting with calendar ads. These ads will give advertisers the ability to promote events directly in Doodle polls in a chronological way.

Watch also the new intro film that was created during our video contest!

*We support IE9, WebKit (iPhone, Safari, BlackBerry 6 and later, Nokia S60 and later), Opera 6 and later, and Firefox 4 and later. We can’t guarantee perfect operation on all other / older software.

We asked the same question in January in order to find out whether the complete redesign would impact usability in a positive way. This time, ratings improved all-around. The decreasing number of support requests shows that many of the UX issues have been resolved and Doodle has become more intuitive to use.

We will continue to work on making Doodle as user-friendly as possible!

(English version coming soon)

We congratulate the team on their great work and hope they enjoy safe flights around the world with their prize! Beckdesign’s director Guido Beck told us, “Within a short time, we produced this stop-motion film as a contest entry from the original text to the final cut. Since we use Doodle ourselves, we had a lot of fun with this video project.”

The second prize goes to the collection of fruit in “Let’s get together” by Magdalena Kauz. Magdalena described her work like this, “It was a lot of fun to view something that you do every day with completely different eyes by taking uninspiring organizational work and transforming it ‘fruitfully’. A special thanks goes to Cherry, Apple, Pear, and Peach.”

We’d like to say a big thank you to all of the filmmakers for their engagement, their great ideas, and the good time we had watching the entries! Enjoy the videos below!

Pinning Doodle in the Internet Explorer takes seconds: click the icon to the left of the web address in One Box, or the tab for the website, or the website’s icon on the New Tab page, and then drag it to the taskbar. That’s it. Once it’s pinned, it shows up as its own thumbnail, separate from Internet Explorer. Now all it takes is one click to start scheduling an event.

Further information: Microsoft product page

Furthermore, we improved the poll creation wizard for visually impaired individuals by making it more accessible for screen readers, plus we streamlined the login process for MyDoodle.

There is one piece of recurring feedback that has surprised us the most, and that is that Doodle polls are printed out frequently and users were missing this feature that had been moved exclusively to the poll administrator view. Many of them print out a poll to check availabilities in the personal calendar on the screen. Those users need to know that our calendar integration offers a much better way to get calendar data synced with a Doodle poll!

There’s no button to switch back to the old design and that’s the reason why we want to highlight three things in dealing with the new one:

• The print view has been given back to all participants of a poll.
• Wide polls are shown in the compact “accordion” view. There are technical reasons to restrict the width of a poll and the majority of users quickly get used to the extra click that it takes to enlarge it.
• Entries in the “name” field are not completely visible. We’re working on making the name row clearly visible on large polls as well, and we’d like to ask our users to insert only the name in the name field and to use the comment field for any additional information.

Did you notice that the blog is now in the new layout, too?