Aerobay is live now
The client this research was for has since launched its app and website —
As the remote Design Researcher at ONEHOUSEDESIGNS, I ran a market and SWOT analysis of OHD's EdTech client, Aerobay, against three major competitors, then built proto-personas and research screeners across three very different audiences — Classes 3–5 students, their parents, and educators — to propose a responsive, mobile-first feature direction for the client's positioning strategy.
What ONEHOUSEDESIGNS is, why Aerobay needed this research, and where I sat in it.
ONEHOUSEDESIGNS (OHD) is a Kolkata-based design research agency. For this engagement, OHD's client was Aerobay, an EdTech company — meaning my findings went to Aerobay through OHD, not directly.
Aerobay needed to find its niche in a suddenly crowded market. The pandemic-driven shift to digital education had already handed BYJU'S, Unacademy, and Vedantu massive growth and brand recognition — Aerobay needed to know where it actually fit before deciding what to build next, not after.
I ran the competitive analysis that framed the problem, then built the proto-personas and research screeners that grounded it in three very different audiences. The output was a proposed feature direction — not a shipped product, a strategic recommendation for a client I never spoke to directly.
months, remote
competitors audited
audience segments researched
feature direction proposed
Before any persona work, I ran a market and SWOT analysis of Aerobay against the three names dominating pandemic-era digital education.
A pandemic-era EdTech market doesn't reward being generically good. BYJU'S, Unacademy, and Vedantu had already claimed "comprehensive" and "exam-focused" at massive scale — the SWOT's job was to find where Aerobay didn't have to compete head-on.
That question is what shaped everything after it: not "how do we out-build BYJU'S," but "who specifically is Aerobay actually for" — which is what turned this into a three-audience research problem instead of a one-persona one.
An EdTech product for Classes 3–5 has three stakeholders who each decide something different — and none of them are the same person.
The actual user. What keeps a 8–10 year old engaged is not what keeps their parent reassured or their teacher satisfied — engagement and fun had to be researched on its own terms.
The buyer and the trust gate. A parent isn't evaluating engagement — they're evaluating whether they can see their child's progress and trust the platform with their attention.
The credibility check. Whether an EdTech product aligns with how a classroom actually teaches shapes whether educators recommend it at all — a different bar than either of the other two.
Recruiting three respondent types remotely — a child who needs parental involvement to even participate, a busy parent, and an educator with limited availability — isn't the same recruiting problem three times over. The screeners existed to make sure whoever we actually got to talk to was the right kind of student, parent, or educator for what we were trying to learn, not just whoever was available.
Where the competitive audit and the three personas converged.
The competitive audit and the three proto-personas converged into one proposal: a responsive, mobile-first feature direction for Aerobay, meant to inform how the client positioned itself against BYJU'S, Unacademy, and Vedantu — not a wireframe or a shipped feature, a strategic direction handed to a client who wasn't ready to build yet.
This is what design research is supposed to produce when the deliverable is an argument, not a prototype: a recommendation specific enough to act on, grounded in three audiences who each needed something different from the same product.
"Completed Phase of Design Research."
This engagement was scoped as research, not a build — so there's no usability score or task-success rate to point to, and I won't invent one to fill the gap. What's real: a completed market and SWOT analysis of Aerobay against BYJU'S, Unacademy, and Vedantu; three proto-personas and research screeners covering students, parents, and educators; and a proposed responsive, mobile-first feature direction handed to the client to inform their positioning strategy.
ONEHOUSEDESIGNS' own co-founder confirmed the research phase as complete — the outcome this engagement was actually scoped to produce.
My findings never went to Aerobay directly — they went through OHD. Writing research that has to survive being relayed by someone else taught me to make the argument self-contained, not dependent on me being in the room to explain it.
Students, parents, and educators don't just need different personas — they need different recruitment approaches, different questions, and different definitions of what "success" for Aerobay even meant.
There was no wireframe to hand over at the end — just a direction, and the research that justified it. Learning to make a recommendation convincing on its own, without a prototype to lean on, was new.
Chronologically, this was my first professional design engagement, four months before Desmania and over a year before 2323Designs. Everything about how I scope research now started with figuring out, remotely and for a client I never met, what "enough" looked like.
The client this research was for has since launched its app and website —