Swaddle Childcare Booking App
An on-demand childcare platform operating in three cities recruits, vets, and trains babysitters and matches them with parents through a mobile app, where parents enter their children's details and booking needs, review sitter profiles, ratings, experience, and rates, then book and pay. The app has been live for about a year, and once parents complete a first booking about 90% return. The opportunity is the next stage: reducing friction and anxiety around the first booking, and designing referral and loyalty mechanisms for both parents and babysitters. Delivering clickable concepts.
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Research, design, and prototype the next wave of the platform experience: reduce friction and anxiety in the first booking, strengthen trust and safety communication and the clarity of babysitter profiles, and design referral and loyalty concepts that encourage repeat use and growth for parents and for the largely university-based babysitter network.
Analyzing the marketplace's current app-centered experience and the website's role as an informational entry point, with a concise competitive and feature scan of comparable childcare and marketplace platforms. Personas for parents (first-time and returning) and babysitters, including university-based caregivers, built from the company's information, platform review, and desk research, with optional short interviews. Empathy maps and a journey from discovery through sign-up, booking details, sitter matching, profile review, confirmation, and payment to repeat use or referral, with particular attention to first-booking trust gaps. Excludes engineering, payment implementation, integration with the existing app, and legal or safety policy design.
High-fidelity, clickable prototypes for the mobile app and relevant website screens showing a lower-friction first-booking flow, stronger trust and safety communication, clearer sitter profiles, parent referral and loyalty concepts, babysitter referral link and incentive concepts, and engagement features for repeat use and community-building. Presented in an executive session covering the first-booking friction points, referral and loyalty concepts, and recommendations for future development; the company receives the prototypes, presentation, and documentation.