Shortening time-to-publish with Quiz Templates

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 design of Quiz Templates, a feature built to replace the blank-canvas onboarding experience with a library of ready-to-customize starting points. The goal was to shorten the time new users take to publish their first quiz without narrowing the platform's flexibility for experienced builders.

The builder gives users broad flexibility and control, which is also its biggest friction point. Users who are not tech-savvy or who lack a clear goal find the blank canvas overwhelming. Without a guided path, identifying a viable starting point becomes the first obstacle to adoption.

Octane AI had no wizard, quick setup, or onboarding scaffold at the time. That gap consistently surfaced as one of the top complaints to the Customer Success team, particularly from new users who churned before publishing anything.

We ran interviews across three user groups:

1. Account Managers. Power users with daily exposure to the builder across many customer quizzes.
2. Customer Success. Front-line contact with the user complaints that framed the problem.
3. New users. More than half of the platform's inactive quiz users sat in this segment, confirming the onboarding gap as the primary friction point.

I find myself duplicating a boilerplate quiz that I've made in the past and just modyfing it, it's easier that way.

— Octane AI user, quiz builder research interview

Four insights surfaced consistently:

1. A blank canvas is a major obstacle. It does not point the way intuitively, which blocks users before they can engage with the tool.
2. The editor is not hard to master once users have something to start with. The friction lives at initiation, not in the core interaction.
3. Offering an onboarding experience is standard practice for builders and logic-heavy platforms in this category.
4. Starting from scratch is substantially more effort than duplicating and modifying an existing quiz, a pattern power users already relied on.

We framed the problem as:

How might we shorten the time users take to publish their first quiz?

We evaluated several approaches: a wizard walkthrough, dynamic building, AI-assisted building, and a templates library. Each had merit, but we selected templates on cost-benefit and scalability. The feature required the least development effort and leveraged Octane AI's existing library of high-performing quizzes, turning internal data into a user-facing asset.

Competitor research reinforced the choice. Templates were a standard feature across builder and logic-platform competitors, and Octane AI's absence of one was a visible gap in the category.

The concept resolved cleanly: give users a simple, straightforward path to create a quiz based on their need, anchored in proven patterns rather than a blank slate.

We built Quiz Templates on top of Shopify's Polaris Design System. Octane AI's platform already uses Polaris, which let us deliver an experience that feels native to Shopify merchants. Familiarity lowered the cognitive cost of the new feature and kept the onboarding flow continuous with the rest of their workflow.

Users can browse the template library, select a quiz that matches their intent, and move directly into the editor with the structure, logic, and copy already in place. The blank-canvas decision collapses into a single click, and the editor itself remains the same interface power users already know.

Reusability

With that, existing quizzes can also be saved as templates to be reutilized, further empowering users to create, mix, and evolve their quizzes easier and faster.

Feature walkthrough

The demo below walks through the end-to-end flow and the range of templates shipped at launch.

Quiz Templates shipped as a coherent extension of the existing builder rather than a parallel product surface. It addresses the onboarding gap that was driving churn among new users, while giving Account Managers and power users a faster path to recurring setups.

Quantitative performance is measured over time. The immediate qualitative gain is a clear path from empty account to published quiz, and the removal of the single most frequent complaint from the Customer Success queue.

Quiz Templates was a relatively low-cost project on development resources, but a significant one for the product team. It was a highly anticipated feature for both users and internal stakeholders, and the surface opens up a meaningful roadmap beyond the initial launch.

The feature has room to grow. Link-shareable templates would let merchants distribute quizzes externally, and a contribution model would let skilled quiz authors publish intricate, high-performing templates into the shared library. Both paths turn a one-way onboarding tool into a community-backed ecosystem.

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.