Explaining destructive actions

Sometimes the best way to explain complicated features is through real world metaphors.

With Poll Everywhere, our presenter can set her polls to be answered anonymously by her audience. In order to maintain privacy through the lifespan of the poll, this setting cannot be changed once set.

This posed an interesting challenge when developing our new "Surveys" feature, where we can take an existing group of polls and create a survey from them. We needed to know what happens when you have a poll that has been set with a destructive action, like anonymity, and inserted into the survey.

Even more important was explaining our thought process in a way that made sense to both devs and non-devs.