Wayground's Lessons Dashboard
Lessons occupy the largest chunk of classroom time, and without a strong lessons experience, Wayground (formerly Quizizz) was absent from the most important moments of teaching. Internally, this was reflected in the numbers: only ~6% of teachers used the Lessons Dashboard actively each month.
Wayground (formerly Quizizz) was winning at quizzes but… only about 6% of teachers actively used the Lessons each month.
This wasn’t because lessons were unimportant. In reality, lessons occupy the majority of classroom time.
So why were teachers not using lessons during their classroom instructions?
In search of answers…
Along with a PM and a UXR, I led 45–50 in-depth teacher interviews, followed by classroom observations and school visits.
Across classrooms, patterns emerged. Teachers almost always worked with two screens—one public, one private. They avoided calling out students by name. They cared deeply about control, but not surveillance. And most importantly, they followed a consistent instructional rhythm.
A lesson dashboard is not a presentation tool.
It is a teacher’s private control room.
If lessons were going to matter, the dashboard needed to stop behaving like a content viewer and start behaving like a control surface for live instruction.
Instead of design principles, we went for a design framework this time!
To translate research into something actionable, I anchored the experience to a teaching model most US educators already use: I-Do → We-Do → You-Do.
As the classroom progresses, the participation of a teacher moves from high to low while the participation of a student increases.
The Lessons dashboard stopped being a list of features and started behaving like a system that adapted to the moment of teaching.
We audited the current lessons dashboard
Apart from general hygiene changes, the navigation and Information architecture was something that didn't add up to the insights we got.
Whenever I come across a problem with such complexity and ambiguity, I put my 100% focus on figuring out the correct I.A.
The new Information Architecture of Lessons Dashboard
To stress test this I.A. (Information Architecture), we validated it against real classroom use cases for teachers.
For eg: If a teacher wishes to move from 1 question to next, what are the possible data points they need to look at?
The side panel was designed to answer all of these questions in a glace!
"Meaningful engagement" as our north star metric ⭐
We pushed ourselves hard and decided to keep our north star metric as "meaningful engagement per monthly active teacher", which means we didn't just wanted teachers to use the new dashboard but also use it more meaningfully during their classroom sessions.
We decided to supercharge the dashboard with more meaningful features!
Teachers can use whiteboard to model questions and have open ended discussions to show step by step solutions. Teachers can also allow students to have their own whiteboard and check realtime progress.
With anonymity as the key principle, spin the wheel allows teachers to select any student at random and ask them to do a task. Students love it!
Most loved feature! Teachers can click a button and all student screens will show this message to gather attention back to the teacher. Specially useful to bring class back from chaos.
Want to mark important things on slides while teaching or need a moment to explain the question/instruction? Annotations open up a full toolkit that allows them to draw on current slide.
Just finished teaching a concept and need to check for understanding? Just select any question from our templates and get going!