UX/UI team Project: NANNY NEST

Our babysitting platform journey: from idea to concept

About the project

This project began with a clear vision: to build a simple, safe, and user-friendly platform connecting parents and babysitters. As a team of three, we embarked on a journey of user-centric design, starting with thorough research to define the needs of both groups. At first, our focus was on parents, since most platforms seem to prioritise their experience. But we quickly realised something crucial: if we wanted to stand out, we had to deeply understand babysitters’ needs too.

Phase 1: Research – from unstructured to structure data

Understanding the real needs of parents & babysitters

Affinity diagrams


While my colleagues focused on the parent experience, I deep-dived into the research of the babysitter UX, conducting usability tests and a dedicated survey. After countless sticky notes and brainstorming sessions, we used affinity diagrams to group and subgroup our merged findings. Slowly, a clear picture of the common pain points and opportunities for both babysitters and parents emerged.

User journey maps

To bring it all to life, we created two user journey maps:

  • Maria, the busy mom searching for the perfect sitter, and
  • Emma, the energetic babysitter looking for reliable families.

Through these journeys, we pinpointed pain points, positive interactions, and ways to improve the experience for both.

Key insights

When we set out on this research journey, our goal was clear: to understand what it truly feels like to use a platform that connects parents with babysitters. We wanted to step into their shoes—both the busy parents searching for reliable childcare and the babysitters looking for opportunities to work safely and efficiently.

The questions driving our research were simple yet crucial.

  • How do users experience these platforms?
  • What frustrations do they encounter?
  • What makes them hesitate, what makes them abandon, what keeps them coming back?

Through our study, we aimed to uncover the real challenges faced by both sides and pinpoint opportunities to make the platform not just functional, but smooth, safe, and intuitive. Every insight gathered was a step toward designing a system that doesn’t just work but truly supports the people who rely on it.

Open full research in Miro

Phase 2: Analysis result

Sitters’ journey: challenges and opportunities

Emma, a university student with childcare experience, was eager to find babysitting jobs. She arrived on our platform ready to sign up, but immediately encountered confusion. Was this website meant for parents or also for babysitters? The homepage didn’t make it obvious, leading to unnecessary friction.
As Emma continued, she faced different, yet equally critical, challenges:

1. Balancing the needs of two user groups

  • Challenge: Emma’s journey highlighted that babysitters and parents have different priorities, making it difficult to create a unified platform. Striking the right balance between these user groups was an ongoing challenge.
  • Opportunity: Create distinct sections for parents and babysitters on the landing page, ensuring that each group receives relevant guidance, tailored features, and a seamless introduction to the platform.

2. Registration & profile setup

  • Challenge: Emma wanted to make a strong first impression, but she struggled to add certificates and references to her profile. She also had no way of seeing what other babysitters’ profiles looked like.
  • Opportunity: Provide step-by-step onboarding, including example profiles, and give them the possibility to upload certificates and showcase verified skills to enhance their credibility.

3. Job transparency & expectations

  • Challenge: Emma was unsure about salary expectations and whether families were offering fair wages. She also had concerns about taxes—was she expected to handle everything on her own?
  • Opportunity: Offer location-based salary guidelines and tax resources to empower babysitters with the information they need.

4. Safety & emergency features

  • Challenge: While parents worried about babysitter trustworthiness, babysitters also had concerns about parents. What if a parent didn’t follow through on payment? What if they cancel too many times at the last minute?
  • Opportunity: Implementing a secure payment system guarantees sitters receive their earnings without issues. An emergency button provides immediate support in distressing situations. Allow sitters to review families so that others can avoid unreliable or unsafe clients.

5. Growth & visibility

  • Challenge: Emma wanted to stand out, but the platform lacked visibility-boosting tools. Could we offer a premium subscription with benefits like priority listing, highlighted profiles, or training certification badges?
  • Opportunity: Give babysitters a way to enhance their credibility while monetizing the platform (win-win):
    By offering optional subscription for babysitters to boost visibility, highlight key credentials, and appear at the top of searches.
    By allowing sitters to earn badges for key qualifications, such as CPR, first aid, or early childhood education.
    By creating a community that helps babysitters to connect with other babysitters to share experiences and get support.

Parents’ journey: challenges and opportunities

Maria, a working mother of two, had always struggled with finding trustworthy childcare. She landed on our homepage after a quick Google search, instantly drawn to its bright, welcoming colors and reassuring testimonials. However, her excitement quickly turned into hesitation. Where were the prices? Would she need to pay to contact a babysitter? Could she trust the reviews?
As Maria explored the platform, she faced several key challenges:

1. Pricing transparency

  • Challenge: Maria was frustrated by the lack of clear pricing details. She hesitated to sign up, unsure if she would be forced into an unexpected subscription.
  • Opportunity: Display upfront pricing for babysitter services, clarify subscription models, and ensure that cost expectations are set before signup to improve trust and conversion rates.

2. Safety and trust

  • Challenge: Maria worried about leaving her children with a stranger. She wasn’t sure if babysitters were properly vetted or if reviews were authentic.
  • Opportunity: Implement verified babysitter profiles, ID verification, trust badges, and a review authentication system to provide credibility and reassurance.

3. Platform usability & navigation

  • Challenge: Parents found it difficult to navigate the platform, often getting lost in endless scrolling and unclear options.
  • Opportunity: Improve platform discoverability with intuitive buttons, structured categories, a well-organized menu, and a search bar optimized for easy access to sitters.

4. Finding the right babysitter efficiently

  • Challenge: Availability and qualifications were not always clear, making the search process stressful and time-consuming.
  • Opportunity: Introduce real-time availability updates, a more visual nanny profile layout, and filters that highlight certifications (e.g., CPR, first aid, special needs experience).

5. Building trust before booking

  • Challenge: Parents wanted to interact with babysitters before booking but had limited ways to do so.
  • Opportunity: Add built-in messaging and video call features to enable direct communication before confirming a booking.

5. Review & reputation system

  • Challenge: Parents needed reliable reviews from other families to make informed decisions.
  • Opportunity: Strengthen the review system by allowing only verified parents to leave feedback and highlighting top-rated sitters with credibility indicators.

Phase 3: Moodboard and design system

Moodboard

To effectively visualize, communicate and align the team to the emerging design direction, we created a mood board of visual references. The mood board effectively communicated the desired look and feel of our platform.
We researched competitors – existing babysitting websites, apps, and tools – and design trends and inspiration on platforms like Pinterest and Dribbble to ensure the visual design communicated its core qualities:

  • Clear – We looked for websites, apps and design elements that prioritized ease of use and understand through the strategic use of white space and clear, legible typography.
  • Playful – We found websites or apps that recall childhood and that showed their playful side through the use of color, shape, animation, or illustration.
  • Trustworthy and safe – We found images, texts and websites that conveyed a sense of trustworthiness through their designs.

Design system

After defining the visual direction through a mood board, we developed a basic design system inspired by well-known web design libraries like Google Material Design. This helped us maintain visual consistency across the entire website. The system included a defined color palette, typography, and essential UI components.

Colour palette

We began by selecting a color palette that balanced feelings of joy and safety. Our starting point was a carefully chosen homepage banner image, selected for its neutral tones and a single playful accent color. This accent color was then used consistently to represent families and children.

Recognizing that the platform serves two equally important user groups, we introduced a complementary color for babysitters. This secondary color was chosen to convey cleanliness, calm, and trust—values that are especially important to parents when selecting childcare providers.

Font styles

Typography plays a key role in shaping the personality and usability of a digital platform. For a babysitting service, it’s essential to strike the right balance between clarity, trust, and a friendly, playful tone. With this in mind, we carefully selected a combination of typefaces that reflect our brand values and enhance the user experience across different touchpoints.

Poppins for text, quotes, and buttons: it is a geometric sans-serif font known for its clean lines and modern look. It’s easy to read, which makes it perfect for body text and interface elements like buttons. The roundness of its letters adds a friendly and approachable tone without sacrificing clarity. It gives the platform a professional yet soft feel, ideal for communication around childcare.

Urbanist for subtitles and headers (H2–H6): it is a versatile, minimalist sans-serif typeface designed for the web. It strikes a great balance between elegance and simplicity. As a header font, it feels modern and structured, enhancing the trust and clarity aspects of your brand. Its design ensures hierarchy and visual consistency, helping users easily scan and navigate content.

McLaren for the Homepage Main Title (H1): it has a casual, handwritten feel that’s still highly readable. It’s a display font with personality, perfect for a hero title. It immediately introduces a sense of playfulness and warmth, which makes the homepage feel welcoming and child-friendly.

UI elements

In addition to colours and typography, we carefully designed UI elements to support the overall visual identity. Buttons, cards, and image containers feature rounded corners, contributing to a soft, approachable look that aligns with the platform’s family-friendly character.

We also made deliberate use of white space to give the interface room to breathe. This helps reduce visual clutter, improves readability, and creates a calm and reassuring experience for both parents and babysitters navigating the site.

Phase 4: From scratch to Hi-Fi prototype

1. Overview of the Phase

In this phase, we transformed our initial ideas and low-fidelity wireframes into a fully designed, high-fidelity prototype of the platform. The goal was to create a clickable, visually refined prototype that reflects the final user experience as closely as possible.

2. Tools and Workflow

We used Figma as our main design tool to build the prototype. Collaboration within the team was crucial: we divided the work based on user flows and used shared libraries and components to ensure consistency.

3. Applying the Design System

We incorporated the design system defined earlier in the project. This included:

  • The color palette designed to convey trust and joy
  • The selected typography system (Poppins, Urbanist, McLaren)
  • Rounded UI elements to create a friendly and safe look
  • Generous white space to enhance clarity and visual comfort

4. Responsive Design Focus

We concentrated on the landing page as the main access point for users and ensured that the site worked smoothly across desktop, tablet, and mobile. On mobile devices, we prioritized a vertical layout and used clean, centered images without outlines. This choice allowed for a more spacious, minimal look while keeping the visuals engaging. On larger screens like desktop and tablet, those same images were given subtle movement and positioning adjustments to create a more dynamic experience. This responsive approach allowed us to adapt the interface to each device while preserving the platform’s personality and core functionality.

Looking ahead

As a team, we are excited about the progress we’ve made so far, while the project keeps evolving. With each iteration, we continue to refine our platform based on user feedback and insights. Since this is a project for a fictional client, we have the freedom to experiment, learn, and push boundaries without constraints.

Moving forward, our focus will be on prototyping and testing our solutions, ensuring that both parents and babysitters find real value in our platform. Whether it’s through refining onboarding flows, enhancing trust and safety measures, or optimizing user navigation, our goal remains the same: to create a childcare platform that truly supports the people who rely on it.

This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to see where this journey takes us next.

Open full research in Miro
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