Making Childhood Dreams Come True
Like most girls born in the 90s, I was obsessed with Barbie. As a freshly minted pre-teen, recently introduced to the internet, I had a subconscious address at Barbie.com. It was where I lived in a parallel pink universe of snazzy outfits and had a pixelated dog.
I grew older, only to find myself living out all my childhood dreams as an independent adult. Now, I draw all day, wear snazzy outfits, and have a real, fluffy dog(!).
I’ve been at Quizizz for over 6+ years, and one of the biggest reasons I chose quizizz.com to become my new subconscious address was that it was built to make classrooms more fun. I am obsessed with the idea of making learning more fun, design-driven, engaging, and accessible so that each student feels included, confident, and empowered—quite the opposite of the education system I grew up in.
When Deepak called me to let me know I got the job, he said, ‘We think you are funny, and students connect with ‘funny’’ Yeah, I made some funny avatars, all right. As an illustrator in a tech company, I was taught code to animate them. I was already feeling ‘empowered’ :)
Five years later, my dear friend and designer, Shashank, created the iconic ‘Gudda’ (meaning: ‘doll’ in Hindi but also Gamification using User-Driven Digital Avatars) for the game mode, Mastery Peak. This cute character, now known as QBit, with expressive eyes and limbs, was designed to empower students with more agency in their learning journey. The ultimate goal was to give them a character they could identify with and feel belonged.
We have big dreams for how we’d like the Qbit to be a part of the student’s academic world, but before it goes on bigger journeys, it needs the perfect outfit!
The Qbit customization project was birthed in a hackathon!
I joined a team of a Product Designer, Shashank, and an Engineer, Abhishek, to explore the idea of mascot customization. We had a fully functional mini-project in an odd 48 hours of rapid prototyping. We also won the hackathon by the maximum number of votes!
After launching some P0 projects over the summer, we released the prototype version for a single game mode to see how the students responded. I won’t lie to you. Kids are honest and can be our harshest critics. We were nervous, but they wanted more!
This test gave us important learnings, such as that kids don’t enjoy the color ‘teal’ as much as I do. We huddled and figured out a guideline that could be extended to making multiple assets in 6 layers with unlimited scope. My fellow illustrator and Genz Designer, Aarya, stepped in with her quick, creative solutions and wacky ideas, especially this little frog hat.
We were quite happy with what we designed for our v0 launch!
This would be a massive challenge for the engineers to execute. But since we literally have the coolest set of engineers, somewhere between the many testing sessions and bug threads, they seamlessly solved it all, and we went live with v0 throughout the product!
Every student playing a game on the platform had a chance to customize their avatar.
I think they liked it?
From v0, we learned that students spend an average of 67 seconds and try 4–5 things from each category to customize their avatars. This is good! We saw that students responded well to two extremes of the variety of outfits offered: basic, desaturated, or super snazzy and loud!
Outfits are cute, but how do we make this more gamified?
A STORE FOR KIDS
They would buy progressively cooler outfits with the coins they earn. How would they earn it? By playing and learning more, of course.
The kids are happy unlocking new clothes with each activity.
The teachers are happy that the students are attempting to play more activities and willingly doing homework + getting valuable data on problem areas in the classroom.
Everyone lives happily ever after!
Do you want to make your own Qbit?
https://quizizz.com/join/avatar-shop
