qizu
A Kahoot-like live team trivia product. Simple, modern, easy-to-use and perfect for team icebreaking.
QIZU.IO↗WHY I BUILT IT
Every few months I’d want a live quiz for an all-hands icebreaker, and every few months I hit the same wall. The good tools (e.g. Kahoot) have a subscription in front of the basics, and nearly all of them are designed for classrooms, which means everything is loud, cluttered, and a little tacky. I wanted the opposite: something you could start in two minutes, that did only the handful of things people actually use, and that looked sleek.
WHAT I WOULDN’T COMPROMISE ON
When a category already exists, design can be the differentiator. Palette, type, motion, and the audio too: the lobby loop and the answer-reveal stings had to be upbeat and never cheesy, which took more takes to get right than anything visual. And beyond differentiation, it’s my taste — I wanted to build something I’d actually want to use.
Multiple choice was 100% of my own use, so that’s what I built. The data model leaves room for other question types, but shipping them would have meant building for a user I couldn’t name.
WHAT WAS HARD
Not the features, but the surface area. One game runs across four screens at once: the host’s admin, the preview inside that admin, the host’s live screen on a projector, and every participant’s phone. Each has its own states (lobby, question open, locked, revealing, scoreboard, final), and all four have to stay in step while a game is running.
I set up seeded fixture data and direct links into every screen and state, so I could open any combination cold instead of clicking through half a game to reach it. That turned a matrix I couldn’t test into a list I could work through.