AI-Enabled Room Transitions + Waitlist Management
Every unfilled seat is lost revenue. An AI system that tells directors exactly who to move, when, and why. No spreadsheet required.
COMPANY:
Procare Solutions
TEAM:
Designer, PM, Dev Lead
My Role:
Product Designer, leading design from beta through GA
TIMELINE:
4 months
status:
Beta
Problem
Childcare directors were managing enrollment with spreadsheets, sticky notes, and memory. Every room transition, every waitlist check, every parent question answered with guesswork.
When a parent called asking, "when would you have an opening?" a director had to put them on hold, open a spreadsheet, cross-reference enrollment counts, age ranges, and licensing ratios, then give a vague estimate. No confirmation, no record, no guarantee it was accurate.
The cost wasn't just inefficiency. An unfilled seat generates $0. And the longer it stays empty, the more that compounds.
"The cost of doing nothing isn't inefficiency, it's lost income every month."
Three methods. One clear finding.
(01)
Support Ticket Analysis:
Reviewed three months of waitlist-related support requests to identify where the process was breaking down at scale.
(02)
Process Shadowing
Watched directors manage transitions in real time. Spreadsheets, notes on paper, mental math.
(03)
Interviews and Surveys
Directors ranked capacity uncertainty and seat waste as a top-2 pain points across all operational challenges.
They want confidence that every seat that can be filled will be filled, without breaking licensing rules or their sanity.
The Stats
20h
average time saved per month when manual enrollment is automated
1 in 3
childcare centers struggle with registration and enrollment
$0
revenue from an unfilled seat, the cost of doing nothing compounds monthly
Top 2
pain points ranked by directors surveyed: capacity uncertainty
How we got to a solution
Neither option one nor option two replaced the workflow. They just redecorated it. Option three was different — a dedicated product space where the AI does the scanning and the director makes the call.
I want to clearly see all my full-time and part-time openings so I can fill every usable seat and answer any parent question, without spreadsheets or guesswork.
Design decisions
Occupancy bars alongside numbers
A number tells you how many seats are open. A bar tells you how close you are to a problem — in real time. Directors make judgment calls constantly. The bar gives relative context that a raw number can't.
Color is never the only signal: every bar is paired with a numeric count and a text label so status reads without color vision.
AI rationale chips
The rationale chips do two jobs: they build trust in this specific decision, and they teach directors how the agent reasons, so over time, they need less explanation, not more.
A director who understands why the agent made a suggestion will override it confidently when it's wrong. That's a better outcome than blind acceptance.
Side-by-side month comparison
Both months visible at once eliminates the need to toggle. Seeing two states simultaneously is faster than remembering the previous state while looking at the after.
Every delta badge pairs color with a text label; status never depends on color alone.
Testing + Impact
Directors trusted the numbers. Trusting the data isn't the same as trusting the workflow. They hadn't yet replaced their mental model of the spreadsheet.
What's next
