Designing a product update teachers could learn by playing
Overview
Teachers weren't discovering myViewBoard 3.0 through a traditional product launch. We turned five familiar classroom problems into a game that let them discover the new features through play.
Role
Lead UI Designer
Interaction design, visual direction, responsive design, character system, localization, and engineering hand-off.
The Team
UI Designers, Project Manager,
Engineers, UX Researchers, Content Team, Growth Team
Timeline
Q2 2025 (4 weeks)
Project Outcome
Shipped live
Designed, built, and launched as a live experience on ViewSonic Education.
4-week delivery
Delivered from concept to production with product, engineering, research, content, and growth teams.
Localized across 7 markets
Designed to work across seven languages, including languages that read from right to left.
CONTEXT
Not everyone in the room is the user
myViewBoard is a digital whiteboard app, sold together with ViewSonic's interactive flat panel displays. It's one of the more popular whiteboard apps in schools across North America. In 2025, it got a major update and relaunched as myViewBoard 3.0.
In EdTech, a product reaches three different people: the decision-maker who buys it, the IT admin who installs it, and the teacher who actually uses it. A campaign can reach one of these people and completely miss the other two. When myViewBoard 3.0 launched, that's exactly the gap it fell into.
PROBLEM
A major update launched, and teachers never knew
Low Adoption Awareness
Over half of active myViewBoard users were still on version 2.0 after the 3.0 launch.
Narrow Reach
The launch ran on LinkedIn, reaching IT and admins, not the teachers who'd use it.
Opt-In Upgrade
No auto-update. A teacher had to want myViewBoard 3.0 enough to ask IT for updates.
No Hard Sell
Teachers tune out pitches, and pressure deepens resistance. Interest had to pull them, not push.
HYPOTHESIS
We bet a game could sell without selling
What We Knew
In 2024 we'd built a personality quiz, Teaching Superpower, that took the ISTE spotlight and drew over 6,000 visitors and 11,000 page views. Gamification clearly worked to attract teachers. The real question was what kind of experience could also move them toward myViewBoard 3.0. A quiz only has to be fun. Selling a real product without triggering a sales pitch raised harder questions:
How might we show myViewBoard 3.0's features without it feeling like a feature list?
How might we make abstract tools feel relevant to a teacher's real day?
How might we connect "here's a feature" to "here's a problem you actually have"?
Our Strategy
Don't demo the tool. Make them need it.
Instead of presenting features, we put teachers inside a classroom moment and let them feel the friction first, then revealed the tool as the answer, not the pitch.
THE EXPERIENCE
A five-minute quest, built to feel effortless
Building the context & story environment
Highlights of teaching approach and strengths based on their choices
Summary of user's teaching journey and key decisions
CHARACTER SYSTEM
Reducing load without losing personality
Last year's 3D GIFs loaded slowly on venue Wi-Fi. I rebuilt the character system as lightweight 2D motion assets so the experience could retain its personality without compromising performance.
Original design for 2024
3D render
2D illustration
KEY DESIGN DECISIONS
Designing for real-world constraints
The experience had to work across languages, screen sizes, and real event conditions. These constraints shaped four key design decisions.
01 Designing for localization
Longer translations like German and Spanish broke the original hero layout. I moved the supporting copy outside the display and created a safer layout that could scale across languages.
Janice L
Nice! This gives the longer languages much more room.
02 Keeping the next step visible
On mobile, placing one CTA below all four character cards pushed the action too far down the page. I moved the CTA onto the selected card, then carried the same interaction back to desktop.
Default state
Hover state
Mobile-first design
First iteration.
Selected
Joy Wu
Much better! The CTA feels super clear now.
03 Removing interaction noise
The first mission concept looked like a game console, but the extra controls competed with the actual choices. I stripped it back to a chat-style interface so there was only one obvious thing to interact with.
Stripped to a chat thread.
One clear choice, nothing else to tap.
Janice L
Looking good! Can we simplify this a little so the choices stand out more?
04 Turning features into rewards
The result page still needed to introduce myViewBoard 3.0 without ending the game with a feature list. I turned the teacher’s choices into unlocked skills, framing each product feature as a reward they had earned.
Sam Perinskie
Love it. The leveled-up moment really makes this feel like a reward.
FINAL EXPERIENCE
Landing Page
[Image: Landing Page, desktop and mobile: 'Welcome to the Classroom Quest' hero banner with an 'Embark on Your Quest' CTA, illustrated classroom-hero characters, and intro copy.]Choose Your Companion
Mission Scenario
Result Page
IMPACT & REFLECTION
The direct hand-off
Shipped, but promotion was paused
Classroom Quest was completed and launched on ViewSonic's website. Before the planned campaign began, the myViewBoard 3.0 product team paused promotion to address usability issues in the core product. As a result, the campaign did not generate enough traffic to evaluate conversion or adoption reliably.
What I’d measure after launch
I’d track three signals: completion across all five scenes, clicks from the Result Page to the download page, and time spent in each scenario. Together, they would show whether the experience moved teachers from engagement to action.
Reflection
This project reshaped how I think about building design: as big-team collaboration, where communicating the work clearly and bringing the whole team along matters as much as the design itself.
Engineering
I involved engineering early and focused the build on the interactions that mattered most. Everything else stayed simple so we could ship on time.
Localization
Localization came in late, especially for Arabic and longer text. I created flexible templates so regional teams could adapt the layout without breaking the design.
Time Constraints
With only four weeks from concept to launch, I had to make fast decisions and prioritise what mattered most to the experience.
Play it yourself
This is the real game — it's live, but no one ever got to hear about it. Try it yourself.