What it’s like being a Designer at Quizizz!

In our latest Design Dialogue series, Adarsh uncovers the ‘why’ behind his fulfilling Quzizz design journey.

Hello! I’m Adarsh, and I joined Quizizz 2 years ago as a product designer. It has been immensely gratifying to design for Quizizz in that time, and in this blog, I’ll try to tell you why.

Our users love us

One of my two favorite internal Slack channels is called #teacher-love-on-twitter. When teachers tweet something about Quizizz, it ends up on this channel. Scrolling through this channel is the best reminder that our users find what we’re building useful and that Quizizz makes classrooms more engaging worldwide.

Shipping velocity

Designing prototypes in Figma is fun, but you know what’s even better? Putting them in front of real users and seeing how they interact with them. Finding out which of your hypotheses are true and which aren’t.

As a designer, you learn most from shipping, and at Quizizz, you will ship. Quizizz’s shipping velocity will catch you off guard no matter where you come from. Everybody is always working toward something; there is never a dull day at work.

The immense scale at which we operate

Last month, Quizizz had 50M+ active users. Every day, tens of thousands of teachers worldwide use Quizizz in their classrooms for the first time. This scale is humbling if you’ve ever tried to build and market something yourself. If you ever wanted to work on something in education, there are few places to have as much impact as Quizizz.

A pleasant side-effect of this scale is that even if you pick a niche in a niche, your experiments will have enough of an audience to give you meaningful results and make you feel like you’re having some impact.

For example, last year, I worked on a project targeted at middle school Math teachers in Texas. That’s as small a niche as one can select, and despite that, over the last year, enough teachers have used that feature. Seeing its overall impact felt meaningful. More recently, I worked on a vocabulary experience for ELA teachers. We exposed it to just 20% of our targeted audience, and even with click rates of 1%, we had enough data to learn a thing or two to guide future projects.

Short distance to users

When designing at Quizizz, you are encouraged to know and speak to the end user. Even though we operate at such a massive scale, teachers and students are always at the front of our minds, and we have well-established structures to keep it that way.

Our excellent UX Research team helps set up and conduct user interviews. Survicate helps us launch targeted surveys instantly and get more immediate feedback. We maintain and monitor feedback forums and actively seek user input to improve our product. The Engagement team regularly schedules playtesting sessions with students to simulate live classroom situations to determine what’s working and what’s not.

Design plays an irreplaceable role in the product

In any workplace, there are tools that your administration wants you to use, and then there are tools you want to use. Quizizz strives to fit into this latter category of joyful tools that teachers and students want to return to.

There are many tools for quiz creation and classroom engagement, but what sets Quizizz apart is the immense amount of thought and care that goes into designing these experiences.

One example that illustrates this care is an innocuous checkbox titled “Show only top 5”. It’s a button that only displays the top 5 students on the leaderboard and hides the rest, recognising that students who appear at the bottom don’t necessarily want their names projected onto the teacher’s screen.

Things do break, but they also eventually get fixed

The reality of being at a startup means that things around you feel broken all the time, and Quizizz is no stranger to that. When I first joined Quizizz, this bothered me immensely, but in the 2 years since I’ve also noticed that things eventually get fixed. This gives me hope!

I’ve learned to be more patient and less frustrated when something isn’t working because I know I’m not the only one who notices and brings it up. There are enough people around me who care about things enough to bring this up, and when they do, somebody will eventually pick it up, and it will be fixed.

You’re not limited to your role

Early on at Quizizz, roles were very fluid. Designers often donned other hats and drove projects from start to finish. We’ve grown a lot since and have gotten more specialised, but thankfully, the fundamental quality of people valuing your inputs if they’re good persists. Everybody is on the same team trying to solve the same problem, and it shows.

You hear about many places with the ethos that good ideas can come from anywhere, but Quizizz actually walks the talk.

You get to work on challenging, unexplored problems

Quizizz operates in a vertical that hasn’t been explored very much. There are many EdTech tools, but there are very few whose bread and butter is making the classroom experience more engaging for students while giving teachers all the necessary tools.

At Quizizz, you wouldn’t be building your 50th checkout flow; you’re more likely to be solving an important problem that historically no one ever cared enough about, and personally, that’s very exciting.

All of the things above condense into the fact that at Quizizz, my growth feels limited only by my own initiative, and that’s my definition of what makes it a Great Place to Work.

Stay tuned for more stories from behind the scenes at Quizizz. Meanwhile, do you see yourself thriving at Quizizz? Check out our open roles.