Careble: A Childcare App for Working Parents

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The key challenge was balancing the diverse needs of stakeholders within the childcare network. Exhausted from childcare, primary caregivers struggled to share daily updates and tasks, which were essential for working parents to participate effectively in childcare. Thus, our app had to support working parents while minimising the burden on primary caregivers. To address this, we investigated the most essential set of information for supporting working parents and iteratively refined our design to structure and present the complex information in a systematic and visually clear way. Our goal was to ensure that primary caregivers could input only the most essential details while enabling working parents to easily understand and apply them.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
Initially, we aimed to design an app that supports a wide range of caregivers, from moms to dads, working parents to stay-at-home parents, grandparents and even nannies. However, during user interviews, challenges faced by working parents appeared striking. Due to limited time and opportunity to develop caregiving skills, many working parents saw themselves as 'clumsy' or 'inexperienced', yet there was a lack of resources to support them during childcare. This was the aha!-moment for our team—we recognised the need to focus on supporting working parents in handling childcare tasks. This was the starting point for ‘Careble’, which defined the app’s purpose and provided a roadmap for our team to develop a solution tailored to working parents.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
With the ongoing transition from traditional patriarchal childcare to coparenting, we anticipate ‘Careble’ will see increasing demand in the next five years. So far, our efforts have focused on developing the concept and prototype, and our next step is to test the product with real users. This will help us uncover additional real-life challenges and features that may not have been considered during the initial development. Moreover, as the landscape of caregiving roles and networks continues to evolve, we are planning to update our product to address emerging needs, ensuring it remains relevant and supportive for all caregivers. Ultimately, ‘Careble’ envisions a healthy childcare culture that benefits the child, the couple and the family.