Embibe is one of India's biggest AI-driven learning platforms, the place students go to prep for JEE, NEET, SAT and every other exam that keeps families up at night. I walked in a fresher into an 18-person design team, and walked out having designed for phones, laptops, government offices, 86-inch smartboards, and screens that don't exist at all.
I joined to do B2B work. Then the canvas started growing. A teacher's smartboard is not a student's phone. A government official's wall display is not a laptop. And an AR camera view isn't a screen at all, it's the room itself. Each one broke a habit the previous one had taught me.
Teach Lite put a teacher's whole toolkit, whiteboard, videos, 3D models, practice questions, on one smartboard. The users? Teachers aged 28 to 55, most comfortable with a smartphone and suspicious of everything larger.
The research trip changed how I think about design. The biggest problem wasn't a flow or a feature. It was height. Shorter teachers physically couldn't reach buttons placed where a desktop habit had put them. Mid-lecture, in front of thirty students, a teacher was jumping for a toolbar. Global players like BenQ had the features; nobody had thought about the arm.
So I designed for bodies, not cursors, reachable controls, minimal on-screen clutter, and an interface that worked on the outdated, low-end boards most Indian institutes actually own.
Result: 30–40% smoother session flow, fewer mid-class disruptions, and tuition centers that had avoided smartboards entirely finally switching them on. Over 10,000 learners ended up on the other side of those boards.
Working across projects, I kept noticing the same disease: four shades of the same blue, three versions of the same button, developers pinging designers daily to ask which one was "the real one." Every new project started from scratch, and every fresh start invented new inconsistencies.
So I worked with the design lead and engineering to build the fix, a full system: color, type, iconography, spacing, corner radii, shadows, and a component library where every component carried its name, states, and breakpoints. Plus annotations, so a developer never had to guess again.
And because a design system without policing is just a very organized suggestion, I kept reviewing new designs for stray manual styling and nudged them back into the system. Rework dropped by about half. Development sped up by roughly 30%. The daily "which blue?" pings stopped.
Before this dashboard, education officials tracked schools through manually compiled reports, slow, error-prone, always outdated by the time they landed. My job: turn that paper trail into a screen an official checks over morning tea.
I mapped every user role from district office to state authority, worked out which numbers each level actually cares about, and leaned hard on visual answers, heatmaps, trend arrows, simple graphs, designed to be read at a glance, and at a distance, on the large screens government offices run.
For the first time, officials could independently check teacher attendance in remote areas or infrastructure gaps in schools, no report requests, no waiting. Some departments liked it enough to start their own regional pilots. Monitoring efficiency rose by half.
Lens was the wild one: point your phone at study material, and the content comes alive in AR. No screen edges, no fixed layout, the interface is wherever the student points the camera. Every design instinct I'd built until then needed renegotiating.
It became the project with the loudest outcome of my Embibe run, a 70% rise in user acquisition, and a collaboration that put the product in front of several state governments.
Read the full Lens case study →A 360° companion for teachers, manage classes, build tests, assign homework, schedule sessions. The unglamorous everyday tool that quietly holds a school together. Still live at school.embibe.com.
Hired for B2B. Ended up shipping B2C features and government collaborations too, the kind of scope creep you say thank you for.
I learned that the hardest users are the best teachers, a tuition teacher who fears the wrong tap, an official who trusts paper more than pixels. Win them, and every other user is easy.
I learned that systems outlive screens. The design system nobody sees is still saving hours today; half the screens I made are already redesigned.
And I learned that "the user" is a body, a height, a room, a habit, not a persona slide. That lesson followed me straight to Cricbuzz, where the screens got smaller but the audience got forty crore louder.