Bili: The Adults in the Room
A kids' app only reaches kids if teachers and parents can get them in
Product design
UX
The teacher dashboard today.
The short version
Since 2023 I've designed everything those adults touch: sign-in, onboarding, the teacher and family dashboards, caregiver invitations, and what happens when school access ends.
Kids are Bili's users, but adults decide whether kids ever get in: the teacher with 20 iPads before the bell, the parent with an Android phone, the district that pays.
PILOT LESSONS
Where the grown-ups got stuck
"15 minutes a day"
A kindergarten teacher was typing an email and password into every iPad, every morning.
Families couldn't get in
Sign-in at the family launch didn't go smoothly, and many families didn't have iPhones.
"Show us progress"
Teachers and parents loved Bili, but both asked to see what kids were learning.
One path through my onboarding prototype: a parent signing up at home.
ONBOARDING
One sign-in for four kinds of grown-ups
Teachers with a school, teachers without one, parents connecting to a class, parents at home: each needed a different way in.
I designed and prototyped the whole onboarding, tested it with teachers, caregivers and education professionals, and separated signing up from setting up a child.
Every route in: teacher or family, school or home, code or sign-on.
Teachers
Built for the teacher with 20 iPads before the bell
After the pilot we shipped a QR shortcut within weeks, then class codes, then sign-on through the platforms districts already use.
While designing that last step, I noticed teachers can't pull a roster straight from ClassLink, so Bili shows the classes ClassLink links to them and they choose which to bring in.
Code, QR or district sign-on, and teachers pick their classes instead of retyping them.
THE DASHBOARD
Who needs me today?
The first dashboard showed everything about every student. The redesign answers a teacher's questions in order: How is my class doing? Who needs me? Where are they growing? Reading-only activities show "N/A" instead of a made-up accuracy score.
2024 beta reports → today's progress page.
Class overview · Students and home access · One child's summary · Literacy insights.
Adding a class on a phone.
ON A PHONE
Glance on a phone, type on a desktop
My rule for the teacher dashboard: if a task is simple and glanceable, it works on a phone; if it needs typing or uploading, it belongs on a desktop. The mobile flow stays honest about it: "Adding students is easier on desktop!"
DEV CONSTRAINTS
Details shaped by the developers
The developers' constraints shaped the details. The dashboard caps a class at 50 students, flags duplicate students before adding them, and lists any errors in an uploaded CSV so a teacher can fix them.
COMPONENTS
One set of parts for every adult screen
The adult screens share one set of components. The parent dashboard was built almost entirely from the teacher dashboard's parts, which made it a much lighter build. There's little illustration in this part of the app, so AI's role was different: I used it to bounce ideas around for flows and screens before designing them.
Families
Invitations that don't depend on launch night
Invitations used to depend on a launch night that didn't work for everyone.
I designed invitations that go out by email and on a printed flyer, with a QR code and a backup code. My first fix during the pilot was smaller: the flyer PDF was too big to email, so I rebuilt it with live text, from 2.1 MB to 24 KB.
In the first pilot, 15 of 29 caregivers used phones that weren't iPhones, so they had to use Bili in a browser. Bili launched on Android in February 2026.
From a teacher's invite to a family at home.
One phone, two audiences: kids tap Play, grown-ups get progress built for a phone.
When school access ends.
WHEN ACCESS ENDS
Keep access, not subscribe now
Families who come through a school eventually lose that access, and until 2026 nothing in the app told them. Now a banner counts down two weeks, and the button says "Keep access," not "Subscribe now," which sounds like a newsletter. One plan screen does both jobs; only the headline and the way out change.
What's still hard
Getting in. In a March 2026 classroom observation, a first-grade class lost about 5 minutes of a 15-minute center rotation getting into the app, and a rural pilot’s biggest complaint was logins. Sign-in got dramatically faster, from typed passwords to codes, QR codes and district sign-on, and it’s still where I’m focused.
THE RESULT
Live for teachers and families
73%
Of parents in the first classroom pilot want their district to pay for Bili.
One code
Classroom sign-in moved from typing passwords to class codes, QR codes and district sign-on.
Live
The teacher dashboard launched in December 2025, and families used their dashboard in the 2026 home pilot.
What I learned
Design for the adult in the room
A kids’ app only reaches kids if a teacher can set it up before the bell.
The smallest words do the most work
“Enter classroom code” and “Keep access” solved problems no redesign could.
Answer the teacher’s question first
A dashboard isn’t a data dump; it’s “who needs me today?”
