IXL Quiz Analysis
Enhanced Quiz Analysis to Bridge High-Level and Detailed Insights
Shipped February 2025
BACKGROUND
IXL is a leading edtech platform, helping 16+ million students and educators track progress through personalized learning and powerful analytics.
As a designer on their Teacher Analytics team, I was tasked with expanding the Quiz Analysis report to support an exciting new feature: Admin Quizzes. With this launch, school and district admins could create and assign assessments aligned with their state standards. My job was to ensure that when these quizzes rolled out, teachers would have the right tools to analyze student performance—quickly and intuitively.
Beyond integrating admin quizzes into the existing Quiz Analysis, this project was also an opportunity to enhance the overall experience by improving data visualization and providing new ways for teachers to extract meaningful insights from student results.
IMPACT
30% increase in usage on the Quiz Analysis Report since launch, 40% of that traffic coming from the newly introduced Student Response screen.
USERS
Teachers (1+ million)
MY ROLE
UX/UI, Prototyping
TEAM
Me (solo product designer)
Amy Guo (PM)
Sherry Li (PM)
TIMELINE
Oct 2024 - Dec 2024 (3 months)
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Teachers struggle to efficiently analyze student performance data and identify learning gaps.
The previous Quiz Analysis experience provided limited insights, forcing teachers to manually interpret vague performance data and piece together student progress. Without clear breakdowns, identifying struggling students and determining which concepts needed reteaching was time-consuming and overwhelming.
THE SOLUTION
An improved system that provides teachers with clearer insights and a more efficient way to analyze student performance.
By introducing flexible performance views, enhanced data visualizations, and a new dedicated Student Response screen, the redesigned experience simplifies analysis and enables teachers to pinpoint learning gaps faster.
The new Quiz Analysis: Overview (left) and the new Student Response screen (right)
Project Constraints
Existing UI Framework: We had to work within established design patterns, limiting drastic changes.
Tight deadlines: The release had to align with IXL’s schedule of launching major features during school breaks to avoid classroom disruptions.
Stakeholder & Cross-Team Requirements: Iterations needed to accommodate feedback from multiple teams, ensuring alignment with the overall product vision.
Device & Screen Size Variations: Some features were rethought to maintain accessibility across touchscreens and smaller screens.
Design Goals
1. Allow teachers to efficiently switch between analyzing student performance by individual questions or academic standards.
2. Provide a frictionless way for teachers to drill into student responses and identify patterns.
3. Make performance data intuitive & actionable.
DESIGN
Assessing the Foundation
Since we were integrating standard-based view into the existing platform, the initial focus was on maintaining a seamless experience while introducing new functionality. The biggest challenge was ensuring teachers could easily access more detailed insights into student performance on these quizzes.
Before designing, I reviewed the existing Quiz Analysis to identify key areas for improvement, such as the lack of individual student scores, limited performance breakdowns, and unclear question review formatting. These limitations made it difficult for teachers to quickly analyze data and extract meaningful insights.
The before and after screens of the Quiz Analysis page are annotated below to highlight key design changes and improvements made to enhance usability.
ITERATIONS
Redesigning Hover Interactions for Better Performance Analysis
For our v1, we initially designed a hover state over the performance bar in the standard view to give teachers quick, high-level insights into how students performed on individual questions related to a standard.
We ultimately decided to move away from a hover state because of its limited accessibility on touch devices, and instead opted for a question dropdown that provided the same high-level insights while also offering more information/context.
New Student Response Screen for Deeper Insights 🔎
Since the previous Quiz Analysis report didn’t offer teachers the ability to see how students responded or access detailed information about the questions, we introduced an additional screen within the Quiz Analysis to help teachers dive deeper into student responses. This separate screen was designed to provide detailed insights while keeping the main interface clear and focused, ensuring teachers aren’t overwhelmed by excessive information upfront.
Since this screen was created from scratch, I had more flexibility in designing a layout that meets the needs of teachers. At the same time, adopting elements from the Overview screen, such as the question table, to ensure a cohesive experience, as this is only an extension of the Quiz Analysis.
To bridge these 2 screens, I incoporated a tab at the very top of the report to ensure easy navigation between high-level performance data and detailed student insights.
FINAL DESIGN
Empowering Teachers with Clearer, Actionable Insights 🎯
The newly revised Quiz Analysis focused on improving usability and clarity by refining data visualizations with cleaner layouts and intuitive performance indicators to make insights more scannable. A toggle was introduced to allow teachers to seamlessly switch between question-based and standard-based performance views, providing flexibility in how they analyze student data.
Additionally, we designed a new Student Response screen that allowed teachers to dive deeper into individual and class-wide performance, complete with contextual question details and response breakdowns.
CONCLUSION
Project Reflections
What began as a project to simply integrate state-standard quizzes into the existing Quiz Analysis quickly grew into something much more impactful. As we delved deeper into the design process, it became clear that this was a unique opportunity to not only incorporate new functionality but also enhance the overall experience for teachers. By improving the usability of existing features and introducing new tools like deeper drill down capabilities, we were able to provide teachers with more intuitive ways to analyze student performance and uncover actionable insights.
This evolution taught me the importance of remaining flexible and open to new ideas during the design process. By collaborating with PMs and stakeholders, we transformed what was initially a straightforward task into a more comprehensive solution that empowers teachers to better support their students.