Kexplora

Conexstra was a Pune-based EdTech startup founded on a specific bet: that classrooms in India were missing a shared digital surface. Teachers had whiteboards. Students had notebooks. Parents had report cards. None of those three audiences could see what the other two were doing in real time.

Kexplora was the product. A classroom app projected onto the wall, mirrored on students' phones at home, surfaced to parents through a parent portal. Teachers prepared lessons on the app; the app pushed those lessons to students' phones for review; parents saw what was being taught and how their child was engaging. One product, three audiences, one shared context - the classroom itself.

I joined as employee number seven - brought in as the founding designer to build the product and the brand from scratch.

Fig. 01 · Kexplora - the comet brand and the discover interface, built to make knowledge feel like something you chase through the dark.

From joining the company to launch, I did almost everything a designer in a 7-person startup does: brand, product, marketing site, investor pitch decks, beta testing. Here's the shape of those six months.

Oct 2014 - Apr 2015

Oct 2014

Joined Conexstra as employee 7

Nov - Dec

Brand, logo, first product iteration

Jan 2015

Beta launch with 3 MBA colleges

Feb - Mar

Product reshaped from beta learnings

Apr 2015

NDTV Top 20 Startups in India

Fig. 02 · Six months, from founding hire to national recognition.

We ran beta testing with three MBA colleges in early 2015. Three things came out of that beta that changed the shape of the product - and one of them changed how I think about design work a decade later.

Beta finding 01

iOS-first was wrong. Student phones were Android.

We built Kexplora iOS-first because the team defaulted to iOS in Bengaluru and Mumbai - that's what the founder team used, that's what the CEO carried, that's what designers around us owned. When we put the app in MBA students' hands in our Pune beta, most of them had Android phones. Not iPhones.

I pivoted. The second release reshuffled platform priorities - Android-first for student-facing surfaces, iOS and web for teacher and parent surfaces where the device mix was different. The lesson wasn't "validate device assumptions." The lesson was "the founder's phone is not your user's phone."

Beta finding 02

The topic view was too cluttered. Remove the app bar.

Inside a topic - say, a chapter on photosynthesis - we had a persistent app bar at the top of the screen with navigation back to home, the user profile, notifications. Students in beta told us this felt heavy. They wanted to focus on the content, not on the app wrapping the content.

I removed the app bar entirely from the topic view. You entered a topic, you were in it - no chrome, no navigation clutter. The back button and navigation returned when you exited the topic. This small decision shaped the entire product's visual voice: classroom content should feel like content, not like an app interrupting content.

Beta finding 03

The fix for "teachers don't enter content" wasn't a design fix.

The biggest single problem we found in beta: teachers weren't entering lesson content into Kexplora. Which meant classrooms projected empty app surfaces. Which meant the product failed at its central premise.

The obvious design move was to simplify content entry - reduce steps, improve the editor, add templates. I tried that. It didn't move the needle. Teachers weren't bottlenecked by the UX of content entry; they were bottlenecked by the time available to them between classes.

The fix, in the end, was organizational. We recruited students from the MBA focus group to enter content on behalf of teachers - basic assistants who'd digitize teacher notes after lessons. Teachers approved; students assisted; the classroom surface populated. This worked.

The lesson I took from this - and still carry - is that not every design problem has a design solution. Sometimes the real answer is a process change, or an organizational change, or a staffing change. Recognizing which kind of problem you actually have is the first piece of design leadership.

Kexplora shipped. The beta work at three MBA colleges produced enough traction for Conexstra to be featured among NDTV's Top 20 Hottest Startups in India in 2015 - an editorial recognition that came with national visibility and helped us close a seed round.

Kexplora content screens - article, news and video views for exploring a topic

Fig. 03 · Inside a topic - article, news and video views, the classroom-facing content the beta was built around.

Stay longer.

I left Conexstra in April 2015 for a role that felt like the next career step at the time. In retrospect, I was the founding designer of a product that had just made NDTV's Top 20. The right move was probably to stay another 18 months, shape the next two product cycles, and build out the design team I'd have hired into. The decision to leave was not wrong, but it was the decision a 25-year-old makes when he's more excited about the next thing than he is rooted in the current thing. Ten years later, I'd stay.

The situation

Six months, end to end

Three beta lessons that reshaped the product

Outcomes

What I'd change