Personal project · 2024
Making digital learning experiences feel more human
The problem
Facilitators, trainers, L&D teams — they all said some version of the same thing. Digital learning never quite replicated what happened in a room. The energy was missing. Participation felt forced. People showed up, clicked through, and left.
And honestly — we all get why. Most digital learning today still means slides, a quiz, and a "next" button people click through as fast as they can.
But despite its reputation, digital learning is here to stay. Questiory started from that frustration — bringing some of the joy of in-person interaction into digital spaces.
"Digital learning is just not the same as in-person training."
The solution
Questiory makes it easy to build participatory experiences — questions, activities, group challenges — and turns responses into live, collective visualisations.
Our values
What we keep coming back to.
Collaboration
Collective intelligence
When people come together, they create something greater than the sum of their individual contributions. We build spaces where shared knowledge emerges and communities thrive.
Empowerment
Enabling anyone to create
Everyone has ideas worth sharing and stories worth telling. We remove barriers and provide accessible tools that enable anyone to become a creator, regardless of their background or technical expertise.
Authenticity
Real conversations, real insights
Meaningful growth comes from constructing knowledge through experience, reflection, and dialogue. We create environments where people can be themselves and contribute honestly.
Flexibility
Participation on your terms
People learn, work, and connect in different ways and on different timelines. We honour diverse needs and preferences, enabling participation that adapts to how people naturally engage.
Design decisions · Principles
Five decisions that shaped everything else.
Not values on a slide. Actual constraints that drove product decisions at every turn.
Design principles · Questiory
Constraints
Some of the constraints we had.
No account, no barrier
Requiring a login would have cut participation before anyone started. But it meant no personalization, no persistent history, no continuity between sessions — every design decision had to work without any user state.
Async and live at the same time
Sessions needed to work in real time and spread over days. That rules out any interaction design that relies on everyone being present simultaneously — every activity had to make sense in both contexts.
Anonymity by default
Honest participation requires psychological safety. Anonymity was non-negotiable — but it creates tension with building community, recognizing contributions, and tracking individual progress. We chose honesty over tracking.
No ads. No marketing budget.
Every author registered through organic traffic — people who found Questiory by encountering an activity built with it. That is the plan for now: stay close to real use, learn what the product still needs, and build it into something worth scaling before spending a dollar to grow it.
What we are learning about participatory experiences
What a year of real use is showing.
In the first year alone, more than 1,000 authors worldwide used the tool to design participatory experiences, leaving behind over 46,000 recorded responses. Some patterns start to emerge about what actually drives participation.
What we are learning about participatory learning
- 014.2×
Longer questions, not shorter
Response rate climbs steadily with word count. At 8–14 words the rate is 4.2× that of a bare label; at 15 or more it reaches 5.5×. Length carries specificity — a ten-word question cannot avoid naming who is asking and what a good answer looks like.
- 021.6×
Start with a question, not a welcome slide
Activities that open on an interactive question participate 1.6× more throughout the whole activity. The loss is not in the middle — it is at the entry. Once someone answers once, completion rates hold flat.
- 033.0×
Fewer options get more answers
Response rate falls at every step up in the number of choices. Two options returned 3× the rate of seven or more, across 260 multiple choice questions. The gradient is clean and holds in both directions.
- 0487%
A good template beats a blank screen
Activities copied from an existing design ran with a group 87% of the time, versus 62% for those built from scratch. Copied activities also had more slides and more questions. Starting from a design worth adapting is itself a design decision.
- 059×
Depth and reach pull in opposite directions
Long open text returns roughly nine times the writing of short open text — but reaches about 16% fewer people. There is no question type that gives both. The trade-off is real, and choosing it on purpose is what good activity design looks like.
- 063×
A question mark is not optional
Prompts ending in a question mark reached a 29.4% median participation rate; prompts without one reached 11.1% — roughly one third as many. A bare label like "Reflections" gives nothing to react to. A question gives a situation, an audience, and a direction. The effect held across 1,410 prompts.
- 0740%
Responses keep coming long after the session
Nearly 40% of all responses arrived more than a month after an activity first opened. Only 28.5% arrived on day one. Closing participation at the end of a session captures less than a third of what the activity would eventually gather. Activities left open become a different kind of learning instrument.