Jackrabbit Technologies
CircleTime
Mobile App
When adding a new opt-out option to the Email communication page, I had the chance to enhance the entire Preferences page with a user-centered approach, setting the bases for future updates.
When adding a new opt-out option to the Email communication page, I had the chance to enhance the entire Preferences page with a user-centered approach, setting the bases for future updates.
The childcare management system, Jackrabbit Care, needed a new feature that would allow center owners to communicate and share information with parents. The diversity of needs across centers nationwide made it challenging to tailor communication preferences using only traditional email.
Center Admins had to use traditional communication methods to engage with families, making it hard to engage and track communications.
Our software had not created a channel between families and the center, this being a highly requested need by clients and the market.
During discovery sessions, we learned that parents prefer to receive information in different ways, for example, daily activities via email and emergencies only by phone call.
Traditional communication methods are often ineffective when reaching out to families, who would like to receive more information in the format they prefer.
To keep the team aligned, including product managers, stakeholders, researchers, designers, sales representatives, and developers, we held a UX canvas workshop to establish user and business goals.
Key actions:
-User interviews with center owners, directors and parents (internal)
-Ux canvas workshops
-Task completion tests
-A/B Testing
We conducted interviews with childcare center owners, directors, and parents. Our task completion tests showed that the app was easy to navigate and that users could identify the main sections, thanks to its traditional tabbed navigation.During discovery sessions, we learned that parents prefer to receive information in different ways, for example, daily activities via email and emergencies only by phone call.
While working in an Agile environment, the development team began building validated sections, while the design team continued learning and refining other areas, such as Billing and Child Details.
We faced challenges when testing wireframes. Users were confused by the simplified UI and lack of refinement. This made it clear that we needed to present higher-fidelity prototypes to gather reliable feedback.
The team collaborated with product managers, UX researcher and developers to analyze flows like the login experience. This represented a challenge due the technical constraints of our platform and the app store guidelines.
Outdated communication that can't fit parent needs.
A mobile app would provide a controlled ecosystem between centers and families, offering direct messaging and push notifications tailored to customizable communication preferences.
Centers use of email and phone calls is not just bad for engagement but missing opportunities to keep track of payments.
The app would allow parents to store payment methods and make payments online with ease, a win-win for the company, which also offers an integrated online payment processor.
The design team collaborated closely with the development team to understand the technology stack. Flutter was chosen as the framework because a staff app had already been built with it, making it easier to develop a new universal app.
We designed screens to support parents’ main jobs to be done: Messaging, Photos, Settings, and Billing. Having a holistic view of the parent experience helped us highlight how interconnected these features are.
Visually, the interface needed to be more engaging and appealing to parents than to center administrators. It wasn’t just about brand exposure, it had to be visually pleasing and make the content the primary focus.
We implemented quick messaging actions that tested well. For example, if a parent wanted to notify a teacher about a child’s attendance, a suggested pre-composed message was readily available.
Color played an important role in differentiating elements and bringing life to the interface. Since parents are accustomed to high-quality, popular apps, we aimed to maintain a visual standard that made the experience feel familiar and comfortable.
During the design phase was collaborating with developers around systems integration. Certain processes occurred in separate systems, so instead of building all functionalities natively into the app, we chose to use APIs and web view shells to display specific actions.
The use of rounded corners and soft colors help to bring a gentile and relaxed experience. We took this decision departing a bit from the branded heavy purples and blues.
We added icons with distictive colors, common used interfaces and promote the use of emojis to
CircleTime was created based on the structure and architecture from our Staff app. Navigation and pagination structure was preserved to increase efficicien.
This project went through several iterations as we continuously refined the UI, improved functionality, and added new features based on insights from user interviews.
Although usability tests showed 100% task completion success, the final product initially experienced several bugs that impacted app stability.
Additional features, such as Daily Activities, were added over time in response to parent requests. These required backend enhancements, since content had to be created on the center's side before being made available in the CircleTime app.
