Parent App Refresh
A rebuild of the app parents open every day to check in on their kids. Same features they already rely on, a much better feel, and a few things they’d been asking for.
COMPANY:
Procare Solutions
TEAM:
PM, dev lead, engineering
My Role:
Senior Product Designer
TIMELINE:
April 2026 to present
TOOLS:
Figma, FigJam, Lovable, Great Question, Claude
status:
In handoff
Problem
Procare’s parent app can do a lot. Parents pay tuition, message teachers, sign their kids in and out, and follow along with their day. But next to Brightwheel and Playground, it felt clunky, and centers noticed. The parent experience is one of the top three things they look at when choosing childcare software, so a clunky app was costing us deals.
Parents were reporting the same frustrations release after release, and they were asking for things competitors already had, like a real photo gallery. Patching the old app wasn’t going to fix it, so we rebuilt it.
What made this challenging
Same features, new app.
Everything parents rely on today had to keep working exactly the same way.
Whether a family has one kid or three, at one center or two, the app had to work for them.
A brand new team.
We were forming a dedicated mobile team from scratch, with PM changes along the way and a new VP of Product joining partway through.
Rebuilding underneath.
Aging infrastructure meant all of iOS had to be re-architected at the same time as the redesign.
Research
Before going too far, I built a clickable prototype in Lovable so parents could actually tap and scroll through it. We ran moderated sessions with parents who were familiar with Procare and those who had never used it. Here’s what stood out.
From our parent interviews
Photos are the reason parents open the app
“The photo stuff is crucial. Keeps us sane during the day.”
They want to keep the good ones
“I definitely save photos that they take at day care sometimes because I’m just like, oh, this is cute.”
Signing in one kid means seeing one kid
“If I knew that I was dropping off Phoebe and I hit the sign in button, I would just wanna see Phoebe.”
Not every feature fits every family
Drop-off notes were a hit with parents of babies. Parents of older kids saw them as clutter, so centers can turn them on or off.
“It’s differently laid out than Brightwheel, and it just was more friendly.”
Parent, usability study
How we got to a solution
I set one rule early on: trust before delight, friction before features. If a parent isn’t sure their kid got signed in, a nice animation won’t help. Reliability and clarity came first, and most of the decisions after that traced back to this rule.
The biggest problem to solve was navigation. The old app had three ways to get around on a single screen: a hamburger menu, a row of unlabeled icons, and a tab bar. After walking our CPO through it, we narrowed it down to four tabs and three quick actions for what parents do most, which is signing kids in and out, messaging, and sending drop-off notes.
The Solution
Most of the app works the same way it does today. What changed is how it feels, plus a few things parents had been asking us for.
01
What’s new
Photos
For the first time, parents get a real gallery. Photos are grouped by day, week, and month, and parents can pick a bunch at once to save or share.
Reactions
Parents can heart a photo to let teachers know they saw it. It’s a small touch, but it was one of the most requested features we had.
More tab
Billing, documents, and settings all live here now, so the main tabs can stay focused on the day.
02
Same app, new look
Signing kids in and out works exactly like it does now. The difference is that it, along with screens like the login, finally looks like it belongs in the same app.
03
Design system
Under all of this is a new design system, so every screen is built from the same pieces. That gave the app a brighter, cleaner look, made accessibility part of the colors from the start, and gave engineering components they can build with directly. Working in Figma with Claude helped me keep a system this size consistent on my own.
We also designed what happens when things go wrong, so parents always know what’s going on, even when they’re offline.
Where it’s at
The designs are in handoff with engineering. Here’s how we’ll know it worked, six months after launch.
Goal
Today
Target
App store rating
4.9 on iOS, 4.6 on Android
4.8 or higher on both stores
Parent NPS
+37, from 5,023 parent responses
+47, a 10-point jump
Competitive position
Ranked behind Brightwheel and Playground on parent experience
Parent experience becomes a reason centers choose Procare
What’s next
Apple is making Liquid Glass the standard look for iOS apps. We already use it in places like toasts, toggles, and banners, so next we’re bringing it to the rest of our components and making sure the whole app feels native on the latest iOS.
What I’d set up on day one next time
The biggest challenge on this project was engineering capacity. The mobile team was brand new, so people were still moving over from other teams. Once we were staffed up, we also switched to a new development process, all while iOS was being re-architected from the ground up.
Next time, I’d plan the rollout around that from day one. Releasing a few new screens at a time wasn’t an option, because a mix of old and new would feel disjointed to parents. But I’d sit down with engineering early and ask a different question: what can we get in front of parents sooner that still moves our business goals, without overloading a team that’s still finding its footing?
