Centralizing quiz logic with Global Properties

Octane AI is the leading quiz platform on Shopify, based in San Francisco. The product serves two core functions: recommending products based on customer preferences, and collecting leads that merchants push into their marketing stack. It operates as a no-code builder, which means the interface has to hold up across a wide spectrum of user skill levels.

I led the redesign of the custom properties system, the mechanism that connects quiz answers to downstream product data and campaign segments. The goal was to make property management scalable for complex quizzes without breaking the flow of users already comfortable with the legacy pattern.

Custom properties are the connective tissue between a quiz and the merchant's marketing stack. Each product carries its own set of properties. Quizzes add behavioral, demographic, and economic properties on top. Every answer needs properties attached so that recommendations and lead segmentation flow correctly into integrations like Klaviyo, Zapier, and Recart.

The legacy builder handled this linearly, answer by answer. That worked on short quizzes but collapsed at scale. A moderately sized quiz required roughly 90 to 120 clicks to configure properties end-to-end. The experience became cumbersome, error-prone, and hostile to consistency. It pushed merchants to simplify their quizzes rather than use the platform's full capability.

There's a lot of clicking in and out for every question I want to connect to Klaviyo, it eats time that I wish it wouldn't

— Octane AI user, quiz builder research interview

We've ran interviews with two user groups, five participants total.

• Account Managers. The most knowledgeable users on the platform, building intricate quizzes for customers daily.

• New users. More than half of the platform's inactive quiz users sat in this segment, signaling friction with the builder's complexity.

Four insights surfaced consistently:

1. Configuration took too long, and incomplete configuration degraded the output data.
2. Users kept their quizzes oversimplified because building complex ones was not feasible without a dedicated Account Manager.
3. Merchants avoided seasonal or limited-time quizzes because property management was too time-consuming to justify a short-lived campaign.
4. The linear structure made it hard to maintain naming conventions and catch errors.

We framed the problem as

How might we ensure users properly manage their quiz properties in a timely manner?

Custom properties had been iterated on multiple times before, so I built on prior work rather than starting from zero. I mapped past attempts against the new insights and weighed competitor patterns, development effort, internal design consistency, and adoption risk.

Two criteria anchored the solution:

• Preserve individual property management. The legacy behavior had to stay available. Users comfortable with the existing flow needed a smooth transition path, not a forced migration.

• Create a dedicated space for global properties. A centralized surface enables overview, faster management, error prevention, and time efficiency.

The key architectural decision was two-way navigation. Users needed to move fluidly between the answer panel, where local properties live, and the global properties settings, without losing their place in the quiz tree. The legacy architecture handled properties one by one, linearly. The new architecture centralized them: fast to manage, easy to scan, easy to modify.

We've introduced a global custom properties panel at the quiz settings level, and added a shortcut inside the answer panel so users deep in the navigation tree could jump directly to the overview.

The panel delivers three capabilities:

1. Increased awareness. A single view of every property in the system lets users catch inconsistencies, enforce naming conventions, and prevent mistakes before they propagate.

1. Two-way navigation. Shortcuts in both the answer panel and the global panel give users a direct pathway between local and global contexts, reducing friction on repetitive edits.

1. Deeper customization and control. Property names are auto-generated by default. Users can override them, see overrides at a glance in the overview, and reset to default when needed.

The redesign shipped as a coherent system rather than a set of patches. It preserves the legacy flow for continuity, introduces a centralized surface for scale, and keeps the navigation cost low through shortcuts rather than forced context switches.

This was a meaningful technical and UX challenge. The solution space had many viable routes, and several variables shaped every decision along the way: user needs, business goals, development cost, design consistency, and adoption risk.

I feel confident the outcome is an elegant solution to a genuinely complex problem. Evaluating its performance over time is the natural next step, and the one I look forward to most.

Most of my projects are protected under NDA. If any part of this case study sparks a question, I'm always happy to talk it through over coffee.