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Our timezone selection has always been a pain for our users — and, as a consequence, for us too. It was very cumbersome to find the correct timezone in an overly long list of countries, cities, and timezone abbreviations. With our latest release, we have introduced a new UI element that should make things much easier:

Now, if you want to adjust a poll’s timezone, you can first select your country and then one of the major cities that represent your timezone. And you can use the search field to quickly narrow down the candidates.

“Can’t make it”

If none of the options offered in a poll suit you, there is now a short-cut button to decline all options. Simply enter your name and click “Can’t make it”. We also think that this additional button makes life easier for our first-time users who might otherwise not know how to decline all options.

Straight to the dashboard

Most of our users appreciate that they don’t have to register to use Doodle. However, if you are a registered Doodle user, you benefit from a number of advantages. One of these is a dashboard with an overview of all your polls. And as of today, registered users will be taken directly to that dashboard rather than the regular homepage when they access www.doodle.com. You can always visit the homepage by clicking on the Doodle logo on the top left.

Mandatory e-mail address

Previously, we did not require you to enter your e-mail address when creating a poll. However, the vast majority of our users always entered their e-mail address. And those who didn’t often ran into problems — e.g., because they lost the admin link (or even the participation link) to their poll. So we decided to make life easier and more consistent for everybody by requiring a valid e-mail address for all new polls.

Revamped admin mails

We love to experiment and try out new things on our quest to make Doodle as user-friendly as possible. Many things work, but some things don’t. Our latest redesign of the admin mail confused a lot of our users so we went back to the drawing board and came up with an alternative that should now please all existing users as well as new ones.

Let us know if they don’t.

We’ve received hundreds of great pictures for our Doodle Snapshot contest, and now that the submission period has concluded, we’d like to encourage you to vote for your favorite picture. You can vote until 5PM Eastern on June 29th, and we’ll then select the winners and announce them on July 2nd at 9AM Eastern. The votes don’t determine the winners, but they will be considered while we make our decisions.

Who will win? Come back to the blog on July 2nd to find out!