We are designing memorable learning experiences for 70 million students in more than 100 countries. We are the Quizizz design team.

👩‍🏫 Teachers spend way too much time on work other than teaching.

Like planning lessons, taking attendance, preparing tests, grading them, 100s of admin tasks, and more. Most teachers are overworked and underpaid. We want to free up their time so that they can focus on more meaningful activities like spending time with students who need extra love and care.

🙇🏻‍♂️ Most students don’t really engage with or enjoy their classroom activities.

You have a test on Monday? Your weekend is ruined. You sit through classes not because you want to but because it’s forced on you. We just try to make students want lessons, practice, and assessments.

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🎯 We started out with just doing one thing really well. Assessments. Teaching is like stand-up comedy. The same way comedians hone their material by getting feedback from their audience, teachers need to get feedback from their students. Comedians can figure out what’s working and what’s not working with how much the audience is laughing and on what. Teachers need to know this too but there’s no fast and reliable way to do it. This is what Quizizz provides.

🎮 For students we turned these assessments from stress chambers to something a lot more easy-going, and fun. From something they want to avoid at all costs, to something they look forward to. We turn assessments into a multiplayer game—a classroom experience.

Currently, we’re retiring from just being an assessment(tests and exams) platform. We are becoming a complete learning platform. We want to apply the lessons we learned while building our assessments product to all the other activities teachers do during classes.

📢 We are open to receiving and giving direct feedback.

The only way we can keep improving as individuals, and as a team is through feedback. Recognise that being receptive to feedback is the single biggest growth multiplier. In a team setting, doing this builds trust within the team. And trust is the foundation of teams that make a meaningful impact.

🤝 When giving feedback, our aim is to assist, and to make sure the feedback is actionable. Giving direct feedback isn’t a pass for us to be jerks.

For eg. if we find a meeting unproductive, and the feedback we give is “this meeting didn’t need me, and it was a waste of my time”—this is jerk feedback. Instead better feedback looks like “if you share the agenda in advance, then I can decide if I can be useful in this discussion or not in advance”

💜 When receiving feedback, make sure you appreciate the person giving you the feedback. Then either accept or discard the feedback using your own judgment.

📈 We deliver impact.

When we start working on a project, we focus a lot of our energy on figuring out why we’re doing this project, and what is the desired outcome. It’s our job to have clarity on both of these questions. Only then we start doing what we do i.e. design.

After having a clear understanding of what a successful outcome is, we leave no stone unturned in order to meet the outcome. And we tie the design decisions to this successful outcome.

💡 More often than not, the chances of success after shipping the first iteration will be low. Learn from what went wrong, and go back at it again.

🛠 We have a bias towards action.

Getting stuck is fine. Not asking for help to get unstuck is not fine.

Calling out blockers that are not being resolved is fine. Being aware of the blockers and shrugging from calling it out is not fine.

Recognising that the situation will never be perfect, but we will still have to act is important. Inaction is not an option.

🏁 We take things to the finish line. Fast.

We take ownership. We recognise that what we do on our design software isn’t the design, it’s what gets used by a user. We ship.

The only edge an org of our size over the Googles and Microsofts of the world is that we are nimble, we can change our direction, we can move fast. And recognising this being a part of the Quizizz design team is important. We also take pride in never being the dependency. We set a planned deadline, and we meet that deadline.

🤌🏽 But we don’t use speed as an excuse for quality.

We move fast but that doesn’t mean we trade off on quality of software we ship. iPod was a breakthrough in technology back in 2001. It exuded quality like nothing else did. It went from idea to people’s hands in a span of 290 days.

If we’re using speed as an excuse of quality what we’re really doing is saying that good design has to be slow, when there’s evidence that suggests otherwise.

🤓 We are professionals. We show up everyday.

We don’t reward people who have moments of brilliance. We reward people who consistently deliver impact. Consistency over perfection.

But why? Because when you are consistent, you signal your team members that this is the least you can expect from me. That makes it easier for the team to figure out what they can really achieve with you, and how they can hold you accountable.

Short answer: We’re figuring it out.

Long answer: We embarked on this journey to promote a culture of feedback so that every designer can elevate their game. We see its value first hand. Every one of us has different expertise, there’s an overlap, but the way each one of us thinks is different. So, bringing everyone with diverse perspectives has been invaluable.

But as a team, we are still hesitant to show our work. We are figuring out how to set the stage, ask for pointed feedback, format that works the best, etc.

With critiques, the end goal is simple — consistently get better at giving and receiving feedback.

🖌 Design

Figma

Google Docs

Principle for micro-interactions, animations

Creative Cloud

🔎 Research

Dovetail for knowledge base

Hotjar for session recordings, heatmaps

Lookback for interviews, user testing

Metabase for quant data

• This Ken piece titled “No home comforts as Quizizz seeks to replicate US success in India” talks about Quizizz’s past and future. (Access from here if paywalled)

• This podcast where our founder Ankit covers a wide range of topics from what sparked the idea to start Quizizz to importance of design in success of Quizizz.

• This YouTube video by a teacher titled “Quizizz: The Indian App That is Disrupting the American Educational System with Gamification”

• This TechCrunch piece announcing our last fundraise.