This story started back in December 2021 at the first post-COVID AWS re: Invent conference. We were staffed at the Welcome Desk of the AWS Developer Community Lounge. The first few minutes were awkward when people started to flow in. People were walking in front of the Welcome desk, and as soon as we made eye contact, they walked away in the opposite direction. An idea came over us; we were missing an icebreaker activity. We started mini-polls at the Welcome desk asking attendees about their favorite programming language, favorite swag, favorite AWS service, etc. Below is a picture of how we utilized the Welcome desk to poll attendees.
As we are always looking at improving our customers' experience, we quickly imagined how we could enhance the setup. Questions like "What if people could vote on touch screens and see poll results in real-time" popped up. We ended up with this mock-up of the vision we had.