Knowledge Checks
Led the end-to-end design of Spekit's Knowledge Checks feature, crafting a seamless learning validation experience that was successfully adopted by 115+ customers.
Project overview
In today's digital workplace, information overload isn't just a buzzword—it's a critical business challenge. With thousands of workflows, processes, and resources to master, employees can quickly become overwhelmed, leading to slower onboarding and reduced productivity.
Knowledge Checks transforms this challenge into an opportunity. Our lightweight solution seamlessly integrates into your team's daily workflow, reinforcing learning through quick, targeted assessments that boost retention without adding to the cognitive load. By making knowledge validation effortless and engaging, we help your employees master essential information at their own pace, right where they work.
My contributions
As the sole designer for the Learning Squad, I spearheaded the complete development lifecycle of Knowledge Checks—from initial concept to successful beta launch. My comprehensive role encompassed:
- Leading opportunity discovery and market research to identify key user needs
- Conducting extensive user research and validation sessions to refine the solution
- Driving iterative design improvements based on qualitative and quantitative feedback
- Ensuring design quality and consistency across all product touchpoints
- Orchestrating a successful beta program that engaged key stakeholders and early adopters
Glossary
GA: General availability
FE: Front-end
BE: Back-end
QA: Quality assurance
MVP: Minimum viable product
LMS: Learning management system
Launch date: August 2, 2022
x1 Product designer (that’s me 👋🏻)
x3 FE engineers
x1 BE engineer
x1 QA engineer
Competitive analysis
Our market research revealed a critical gap in learning assessment tools. While traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer knowledge evaluation capabilities, they rely on an outdated, summative approach—delivering assessments only after training is complete. This disconnected model, where testing happens outside the natural flow of work, fails to capture learning moments when they matter most.
Scope planning
Despite shifting organizational priorities requiring a rapid pivot to Knowledge Checks, we implemented a strategic approach to ensure success. Our team immediately established a phased development roadmap that balanced speed with quality. We broke down the complex initiative into manageable iterations, allowing us to maintain momentum while validating our approach at each stage.
MVP ideation
To maximize impact while minimizing risk, we strategically chose an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach for Knowledge Checks. This decision allowed us to:
- Validate core assumptions with real users early in the development cycle
- Deliver immediate value to our customer base
- Gather crucial user insights to inform our product roadmap
- Accelerate time-to-market for essential features
- Maintain development agility through rapid iteration cycles
Rather than pursuing a full-featured release that might miss the mark, our MVP strategy focused on building the critical features that would solve our users' most pressing knowledge validation challenges. This approach ensured we could quickly adapt to user feedback and evolving business needs while maintaining momentum.
Content creation
We prioritized simplicity and intuitiveness in the creation experience, recognizing that cognitive overload is the enemy of effective learning tools. Our design approach leveraged clear visual hierarchy, with auto-focused primary fields guiding users through a natural flow. Using progressive disclosure, we initially presented only essential configuration options while making advanced features accessible through intentional interaction. This thoughtful reduction of complexity ensured that both novice and advanced users could efficiently create Knowledge Checks without feeling overwhelmed, while maintaining access to powerful customization options when needed.
Error validation
Our multilayered validation strategy for Knowledge Checks minimizes user frustration by catching errors early and providing clear paths to resolution. We implemented a three-tiered approach: real-time field-level validation catches issues as they occur, tab-specific indicators help users locate problems across sections, and comprehensive page alerts provide a high-level error summary. This research-backed validation system ensures users always know exactly what needs fixing and how to fix it—transforming a typically frustrating experience into a guided correction process that maintains user confidence and momentum.
Taking a Knowledge Check
We seamlessly integrated Knowledge Checks into Spekit's Chrome extension, enabling true just-in-time learning validation directly within users' workflows. This strategic implementation allows employees to validate their knowledge while actively referencing relevant content—eliminating the context-switching that plagues traditional learning platforms. By embedding assessments in the browser where work happens, we've removed the friction between learning, validation, and application, dramatically increasing both engagement and knowledge retention.
Results
We designed the Knowledge Checks results page to transform assessment data into actionable insights, helping users visualize their progress and identify knowledge gaps. This psychology-informed approach not only validates achievement but creates natural pathways back to learning content—turning each assessment into a catalyst for continued engagement.
Building a design system
The development of Knowledge Checks catalyzed a crucial transformation in Spekit's design infrastructure. Our analysis revealed a critical lack of consistency across the platform, including over 70 disparate button variants—a clear symptom of our missing design system. To solve this, we partnered with our development team to implement our first comprehensive design system, leveraging Chakra UI and Storybook.
This strategic shift from ad-hoc design to systematic components required extensive documentation and standardization, but laid the foundation for scalable, consistent user experiences across the platform. By creating detailed component specifications and usage guidelines, we not only streamlined the Knowledge Checks development process but established a robust design framework that would benefit all future product initiatives.
Prototyping the end-to-end experience
To validate our vision and align stakeholders, we developed a comprehensive prototype that demonstrated Knowledge Checks' seamless integration within the broader platform ecosystem. This high-fidelity prototype served multiple critical functions: it enabled rapid iteration of user flows, facilitated meaningful stakeholder feedback during development sprints, and provided clear visual direction for the engineering team. By mapping the complete user journey, we could effectively demonstrate both individual features and their cohesive interaction with existing platform capabilities—ensuring alignment between design vision and business objectives throughout the development process.
External beta program
To validate Knowledge Checks before full release, we conducted a structured two-week beta program with four key customers through discovery sessions, asynchronous user testing, and wrap-up meetings. This methodical approach yielded both qualitative and quantitative insights that validated our core assumptions and generated a prioritized roadmap of post-launch enhancements, directly influencing our launch strategy and product roadmap.
Common feedback themes
Reinforcement
“It’s a useful way to encourage the conversion of information into knowledge. It’s an interesting way to start thinking about reading something and then using it.”
“We will be able to test our users more frequently without it feeling like a test.”
“Increases engagement as a gentle forcing function.”
Launch day buzz 🚀
The launch of Knowledge Checks marked a pivotal tier 2 initiative at Spekit, mobilizing teams across product, engineering, marketing, and sales. Strategically timed for release during Q4's peak buying season, this innovative feature aimed to revolutionize how companies validate and reinforce employee learning. The cross-functional collaboration underscored our commitment to delivering a game-changing solution in the digital adoption and learning space.
“This is a huge game changer for enabling sales teams and getting them to retain the information. We have such short attention spans these days, people need to consume training in short bursts - this is the perfect way to achieve that!”
“Knowledge Checks really make sense as a natural addition to the Speks that can be created, and for us, I think it bridges the gap that we had when it comes to introducing something small but new, where a typical LMS quiz appears to be too much for what is delivered. This seems like a really good medium between no quiz and developing something much more complex.”
“As a sales leader who is bringing on new reps, training reps, and changing processes, this is a game changer. Always been wanting Knowledge Checks within our process.”
Post launch enhancements
Through rigorous post-launch user testing and direct customer feedback, we identified critical areas for optimization in Knowledge Checks. Our data revealed specific pain points in the user experience, leading us to prioritize three key enhancements: improved question customization, streamlined reporting capabilities, and a live preview functionality. These strategic improvements not only addressed immediate customer needs but also strengthened the feature's long-term sustainability and scalability for enterprise users.
Sketching the solution
While digital tools dominate today's design landscape, hand sketching remains an invaluable yet underutilized technique for rapid ideation. During the enhancement phase, I leveraged this traditional approach, translating complex user workflows into quick iterative sketches. These rough visualizations helped crystallize the vision for the improved experience, allowing me to explore multiple solutions quickly before moving to high-fidelity digital designs.
Preview mode
A critical insight from employer feedback highlighted the need for a seamless preview functionality within the Knowledge Check creation workflow. We leveraged our existing Chrome extension architecture to implement a dual-pane interface: the authoring environment remained active on the left while a real-time preview rendered on the right. This split-screen approach enabled administrators to simultaneously craft assessments and experience them from an end-user perspective, streamlining the content refinement process and ensuring quality before deployment.
Multiple select questions
While the initial release of Knowledge Checks featured single-select questions as our foundational assessment type, user feedback revealed a clear need for more sophisticated evaluation methods. Based on this insight, we expanded our question framework to include multiple-select capabilities, enabling administrators to craft more nuanced assessments that could effectively measure complex concepts and validate deeper understanding. This enhancement significantly broadened the platform's assessment capabilities, allowing organizations to better verify comprehensive knowledge retention.
Analytics
To enhance training oversight, we developed a robust analytics dashboard that provided granular insights into employee assessment performance. The solution integrated two key components: a comprehensive data table displaying individual metrics such as completion timestamps, assessment scores, and completion status, alongside an executive summary featuring key performance indicators. This dual approach to data visualization empowered administrators to both quickly gauge overall training effectiveness and drill down into detailed user-level performance metrics, streamlining the process of identifying knowledge gaps and validating learning outcomes.
Customer testimonials
“Knowledge Checks are the perfect way to reinforce hands-on training rather than just passively sitting back and listening. This is especially powerful for onboarding in a remote-first world. We don’t want our teams to go to another application, and possibly get lost, just to take a brief assessment.”
“Unlike traditional certifications that are lengthy and time-consuming, Knowledge Checks are easy to create. We can quickly publish bite-sized assessments throughout training to ensure our BDR’s stay on track, and if needed, address misunderstandings immediately.”
“Nobody likes taking long, formal quizzes. Knowledge Checks are easy to create and take, and our teams enjoy them. They’re taking these assessments without even being asked.”
Adoption metrics
Our two-month post-launch analysis revealed compelling growth trends across all key performance indicators. The implementation of strategic enhancements directly correlated with increased user engagement, higher completion rates, and broader feature adoption across our customer base. This upward trajectory validated our iterative improvement strategy and demonstrated the growing impact of Knowledge Checks in strengthening organizational learning programs.