Story Xperiential
A learning platform built with Pixar’s storytelling team — turning a world-class curriculum into something teachers and students could actually live in.
The Brief
A world-class curriculum trapped in the wrong tools.
Story Xperiential had something rare: a storytelling curriculum shaped with Pixar’s own artists. But it was living in a patchwork of documents, slides, and disconnected tools that made it hard for schools to actually teach — and impossible to scale.
They needed a real platform: a place where coaches could run cohorts, students could move through modules at their own pace, and the magic of the material didn’t get lost in clunky software. And it had to be something their small team could manage themselves.
The Journey
From scattered docs to a platform that teaches.
- 01
Mapped the whole curriculum
We started by understanding the material itself — how a cohort moves through it, where coaches step in, what students need at each stage. The structure of the platform fell out of the structure of the learning.
- 02
Designed for two very different users
Coaches running cohorts and students working through modules need almost opposite things. We designed distinct experiences for each, sharing one clean underlying system.
- 03
Built it as a Wix CLI app
Rather than bolt this onto a template, we built a proper installable app — app-owned collections for cohorts, modules, and progress, with a dashboard the Story Xperiential team controls themselves.
- 04
Handed over the keys
The whole point was a platform they could run. We shipped it with documentation, training, and a structure simple enough that adding a new cohort takes minutes, not a developer.
The tricky bits
The part where Wix “couldn’t” do it.
Self-paced progress tracking across cohorts isn’t something Wix offers out of the box. The honest answer to “can the platform do this?” was “not yet — but it can.” We built app-owned collections to model cohorts, modules, and per-student progress, then wired a dashboard so coaches see exactly where every student is, in real time. The result behaves like purpose-built software, because functionally, it is.
The Build
A closer look at how it works.
▸ The coach dashboard
The coach dashboard
Coaches see every active cohort at a glance — who’s progressing, who’s stuck, who needs a nudge. Built on app-owned collections so the data is real, structured, and theirs.
▸ The student journey
The student journey
Students move through modules at their own pace, with progress saved automatically. The Pixar storytelling material stays front and centre; the software gets out of the way.
▸ Self-serve cohort setup
Self-serve cohort setup
Adding a new cohort used to mean a support request. Now it’s a few fields in a dashboard — the platform scales with the team, without scaling the team.
The Wins
What changed after launch.
-
100%
Cohorts runself-serve
-
~80%
Less adminper cohort
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1
Platform the teamruns themselves
-
∞
Storytelling, frontand centre
“They built us something we were told wasn’t possible on Wix — and made it simple enough that we run it ourselves.”