Kiddom Assistant
Project Summary
Designing the Interaction
Design went through several rounds between October and December 2025:
How might we make a dense curriculum more accessible and flexible for teachers?
Risks: AI solutions must support teachers without compromising on curriculum adherence and quality.
Timeline:
2 Months to ship, iterating since
Team:
Designer, Product Manager, 4 engineers, AI Researcher
Kiddom Assistant is an AI chat feature that lets teachers ask natural-language questions about the curriculum they're teaching. I led design and research on it from the earliest proof-of-concept through general availability and the roadmap that followed.
What does it suggest? We iterated on default question chips — pre-built prompts that gave teachers a starting point instead of a blank text box, which our data and early interviews both pointed to as something teachers actually used to get oriented.
When does it show up? We explored several just-in-time placements across the curriculum, but ultimately decided to keep the first release at the Lesson page. If we design it too broad, it competes for attention against everything else on the page; too narrow, and teachers never discover it.
How far do we push visual identity? Partway through, there was an executive push for a full redesign — more distinct branding, more of a unique personality. We made the call to scale that down to targeted refinements instead of a redesign this close to launch, and saved the agentic refinements for the next version when we know how teachers actually intend to use it.
Early Access Research
Once real teachers were using it, I ran a round of 6 virtual 1:1 interviews and a school visit during the early-access window.
Thread abandonment was high. A large share of conversations were started and never finished. That's an uncomfortable number to sit with, but it was more useful than a vanity metric would have been — it told us teachers were finding the entry point but not consistently finding a reason to stay.
Answer quality wasn't the bottleneck — output format was. Teachers liked what the assistant told them. What they actually wanted was something they could immediately use: a printable worksheet, a modified slide, a set of practice problems — not another paragraph to transcribe into their own materials by hand.
We were competing with a workaround teachers had already built. Some of our most AI-comfortable teachers were already downloading our curriculum content and feeding it into ChatGPT or Gemini themselves to get exactly this kind of help. That reframed the goal: this wasn't a feature competing against "no AI," it was a feature competing against a workflow teachers had already assembled on their own.
One assistant, several very different jobs. Veteran teachers wanted fast artifacts and summaries. Instructional coaches wanted unit-level strategy and standards alignment. Newer teachers wanted scaffolding and reassurance. Designing one interface to serve all three without picking a side became the next real problem.
Trust is a dependency, not a detail. Teachers were candid that typos and inconsistencies elsewhere in the platform made them hesitant to trust an AI feature layered on top of it. That was outside the scope of this project to fix directly, but it mattered for sequencing — an AI feature can only be as trusted as the product it's built on.
“Sometimes we’re jumping in and out of different units… so it becomes limiting when you can only look at one at a time.”
“I want to pull from multiple lessons and make a bigger test.”
Where we are now
Working with the go-to-market team, Kiddom Assistant is one of the most useful and popular features Kiddom has.
We are experimenting with a more fullscreen experience to make the output and artifacts easier to read. We will learn from this iteration and see how teachers respond.