Engageli Redesigning the virtual classroom from zero

When I joined in December 2022, a single freelancer handled design and the product’s UX/UI was weak — but universities and schools were using it every day. I ran two tracks at once:

• Keep the live product working better — fix the problems that hurt real classes first. For example: instructors lost track of what was happening at each table once students split into groups, so we gave them one view of every table and a way to join or broadcast to all tables in a click. And a confusing join flow made classes start late, so we simplified joining and added a quick camera and mic check.
• Redesign the whole platform from zero — keeping every important feature, but turning a crowded, complex UI into something simple and intuitive — with a new information architecture, a new design system, and dozens of new features I invented for teaching online.

I led the research on two fronts:

• Our users. Together with Customer Success, I designed questionnaires for each persona — instructors, students and administrators. CS ran them with our customers, so we heard directly from people teaching and learning on the platform every day.
• The competition. A detailed audit of Zoom, Google Meet and other video platforms used for teaching — what they do well, and where they fail a real class.

The gaps were clear — general meeting tools were built for meetings, not for teaching:

The platform is built from dozens of features, but this one shows the thinking best. In meeting tools, an instructor has to choose: watch the whole class, or jump into a breakout room and lose everyone else.

I designed a classroom where both happen together. The main stage keeps everyone on video and in the lesson, while a side pane shows every student — as a list, a grid, or seated at their tables. The instructor can see who is talking, who raised a hand and who needs help, and move between tables, without ever leaving the live class.

Every session ends with a report for the instructor. The top row shows the class at a glance — attendance, hand raises, instructor and learner talk time, poll participation, Q&A and chat — each compared with the previous session.

Below it, the engagement timeline lines up how engaged the class was with what was happening at that moment: whole-room or table time, and every activity — polls, PDFs, screen sharing, whiteboards and videos. An instructor can see which part of the lesson worked, and plan the next class around it.