K-12 teachers in China were teaching from three apps at once: PowerPoint, a textbook app and an activities tool. I led UX for 8 months at iFlytek to fold them into one tool built around how a lesson actually runs.
Teachers kept losing their class mid-lesson while they switched apps. We talked to 30+ teachers and sat in on 3 classrooms for a full day. The surprise wasn't that the tools were hard to use. It was that 87% of teachers wouldn't try a new tool even when they could see the flaws in their current one. They only switch if it obviously saves time.
So we stopped pitching "easier" and designed for "saves time on day one": textbook content and activities live inside the slides, and the controls sit where a teacher can reach them while facing the class.
The Challenge
PowerPoint assumes a speaker clicking through slides in order. A lesson doesn't work that way.
A teacher jumps back to the textbook, launches a quiz, takes a question, then returns. A linear deck can't follow.
Most of PowerPoint's toolbar is for business decks. The things teachers need weren't there.
Every switch meant leaving PowerPoint, opening another app and finding their place again, and every switch was a moment the class drifted.
What We Discovered
30+ teacher interviews, full-day observation in 3 classrooms, and a survey with 500+ responses.
of surveyed teachers use 3 or more apps in a single class
hours a week spent looking for teaching materials, from in-app usage data
hesitate to adopt a new tool even when they see problems with their current workflow
Teachers need to reach the controls while still facing the class
I start with PowerPoint, then switch to the textbook app, then open the activity platform, then back to PowerPoint. My students lose focus every time I'm fumbling with technology instead of teaching.— Middle School Science Teacher
The Solution
Teachers pull textbook pages and AI-drafted content straight into a lesson instead of copying between apps. We scoped the AI to two goals: take prep work off teachers, and protect student privacy.
Quizzes and polls run inside the presentation, so the screen never jumps to another app.
In observations, teachers kept turning their back to students to click. We moved the main controls to the right edge of the screen, and teachers can run the lesson from a tablet while the smartboard faces the class.
Teachers move between the presentation and classroom tools without leaving the interface. To keep it to one screen, we cut most of PowerPoint's features and kept only what teachers use during a lesson.
Key Features
Measured across all teachers at our pilot schools over the pilot period. Engagement compares classroom activity before and during the pilot.
For the first time, I feel like I'm using software that was actually designed for teaching, not something adapted from the business world.— Participating Teacher
When 87% of teachers said they'd hesitate to switch, we first assumed the problem was learnability. Follow-up interviews showed they just needed to see it would save more time than it cost. We changed onboarding from "here's how easy it is" to "here's how much prep time it saves."
Where the teacher stands and where students are looking mattered as much as any screen flow.
With 4 dev teams, 3 PMs and 3 UI designers, shared design principles kept decisions from bottlenecking on me.