A gap at the center of IXL's classroom experience
IXL's core learning experience historically centered around skill practice and adaptive diagnostic. While both were effective for learning and assessment, neither allowed teachers to create assessments tailored to their own instruction.
Teachers wanted the ability to combine questions across topics, reuse assessments across classes, and quickly understand student performance. Many resorted to screenshotting IXL content into Google Docs or using third-party quiz tools to fill the gap.
Quizzes was created to solve that problem.
I initially joined the project as one of two designers helping define and launch the MVP. Strong adoption quickly transformed the opportunity. Within its first year, Quizzes became one of IXL's most-adopted teacher experiences, leading to the formation of a dedicated cross-functional team. I became the sole designer responsible for the product's next phase of growth, expanding it beyond teacher-created quizzes into a broader assessment ecosystem supporting administrators, shared content, and user-generated experiences.
Lead Designer → Sole Design Owner
I partnered closely with product and engineering from early problem framing through launch, helping define the MVP and leading stakeholder reviews with leadership.
After launch, I became the sole designer supporting Quizzes for the next several years. During that time, I owned end-to-end design across every major initiative, including administrator workflows, approval systems, shared quiz resources experiences, custom question creation, and long-term product strategy. As the team expanded, I onboarded and mentored a second designer while retaining ownership of the most complex and highest-impact initiatives.
Give teachers a way to assess what they actually teach
The initial challenge was straightforward: give teachers a way to create assessments that reflected what they were actually teaching.
Research with customer-facing teams and educator feedback revealed three consistent needs:
These insights shaped the MVP and helped us focus on workflows that teachers would return to repeatedly.
The response exceeded expectations. Within its first year, Quizzes reached 16–18% of active teacher accounts, the highest adoption rate of any feature at IXL, with more than 700,000 quizzes created.
More importantly, adoption fundamentally changed the scope of the product. What began as a teacher assessment tool became the foundation for a much larger opportunity.
When classrooms became schools and districts
As adoption grew, schools began asking for assessment workflows that operated beyond individual classrooms. This expansion introduced three major shifts:
Entire schools and districts
Formal assessments
Defined scope and goals
Administrator view allows for quicker scanning of larger volume of assessments
Teachers typically arrive open to exploration. Administrators arrive with scope, audience, and goals already defined.
Recognizing these differences became the foundation for the administrator experience. Rather than extending the teacher workflow directly, I redesigned key parts of the experience around administrator needs, including assessment planning, approval workflows, and large-scale management patterns. This led to the introduction of Common Assessments, a new assessment model supporting school-wide and district-wide initiatives.
Teachers start by browsing questions, admins define the scope first
School and district-wide assessments introduced a new challenge: governance. Because administrators could assign assessments at scale, we needed a system that prevented overlapping initiatives while still allowing distributed ownership.
I designed an approval workflow that balanced flexibility and oversight. Administrators could create assessments independently, submit them for review, and publish them once approved by designated district or school leaders. This transformed Quizzes from a creation tool into a system capable of supporting organizational processes and collaboration across multiple stakeholders.
Administrator sends assessment for review
Gate-keeper administrator approves
From individual assessments to a shared ecosystem
As administrators began creating assessments at scale, another opportunity emerged: shared reusable content.
I led the design of Quiz Library, a shared repository that allowed educators to discover and adopt assessments created by their school administrators rather than building everything from scratch.
The initial release focused on lightweight discovery and adoption. As usage grew, we expanded the experience with search, filtering, and features that enabled teachers to contribute to the library.
What started as a content repository eventually evolved into a shared-content ecosystem, enabling assessment reuse across classrooms, schools, and districts.
Introducing user-generated content to IXL for the first time
One of the most significant opportunities emerged from a limitation in the original product. Teachers could assemble assessments from IXL's content library but couldn't create their own questions.
Write-your-own questions removed that constraint entirely.
This initiative represented more than a new feature. It introduced user-generated content to IXL for the first time, requiring new thinking around content creation, validation, authoring workflows, and consistency with existing learning experiences.
Introducing user-generated content required new input form UI patterns
I led the design of the authoring experience, balancing simplicity for busy teachers with the complexity required to support multiple question types, formatting tools, images, and future extensibility.
Within months of launch, teachers were creating more than 10,000 custom quizzes per month.
The most valuable lesson from Quizzes was that success changes the problem.
Launching the product was only the beginning. Adoption created new opportunities, new users, and new organizational needs that couldn't be solved by simply adding more features.
As the product grew, the challenge shifted from designing individual workflows to designing systems that could scale across audiences, use cases, and teams.
That shift fundamentally changed how I think about product design: not just launching experiences, but creating the foundations that allow them to grow.