Brella.
Brella is changing how child care works. We’ve taken the best of high-quality, center-based child care and made it flexible — design your own schedule and pay by the hour. Child care that’s responsive, not restrictive.
- UX/UI design
- Web and mobile development
- Project management
- Quality assurance
Great products don’t happen by chance.
Take the best of high-quality, center-based child care and make it flexible — families design their own schedule and pay by the hour. Child care that’s responsive, not restrictive.
With smart UX, we camouflaged the complexity of by-the-hour booking and Brella’s proprietary availability and cost models into a simple, delightful experience for parents and managers alike — and injected fun into a pickup process that usually feels like red tape.
Brella’s app makes it easier to be a parent. With integrated software for teachers, front desk staff, and admin teams, it unites the entire continuum of child care — and drove utilization from 50–60% to 85%.
Booking, in one step
One of our main challenges was to enable users to book by-the-hour child care for multiple children, as well as by-the-hour conference rooms or desks, and to optionally reserve one or more spaces at a community event — all in one step.
We achieved this with a matrix of dots that appear in a gentle cascade, and by applying color language and simple visual haptics to communicate function.
Safe pickups without the red tape
Our second challenge was to ensure safe pickups in a drop-in situation where parents and trusted contacts may not be familiar to front desk staff. We created a variety of safety steps: real-time parent invites, phone number and photo verification, GPS location verification, and the ability to modify pickup permissions at any time.
We designed it to bring delight instead of friction: with one tap of “I’m here!” we verify location and identity, then generate a time-limited secret password from a word vault we had a lot of fun writing — “Tiny Magical Forest,” “Red Marshmallow Rainboots,” “Fancy Rainbow Pickle.” Verification takes under two seconds and leaves parents smiling.
We designed versions for front desk staff to manage bookings and check-ins and -outs; a teacher app to see who’s in the classroom hour-by-hour with details like allergies and each child’s favorite things; and an administrative app to manage hours and users, create promotions, and run reports.
This project is ongoing as we learn and iterate post-opening, observing real usage patterns on site and noting areas where we can add even more efficiency and ease for staff and parents.
Brella is changing how child care works.
Melanie Wolff and Darien Williams opened their state-of-the-art flagship Brella location in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, in the fall of 2019, and are expanding to two more LA locations.
We worked with Brella to design and build a first-of-its-kind mobile app for child care booking and safe pickups that would feel like a natural extension of their physical space, as well as custom web applications with front desk, administrative, and teacher functions.
We wanted to be sure that every digital touchpoint with Brella demonstrated the same level of intention, care, and quality that Melanie and Darien put into every element of the Brella experience.
Finalist, Fast Company Best of Experience Design — for an app families use every single day.
View website →- Delightful, on-brand UX for child onboarding, identity verification, booking, and pickups
- Interface design utilizing existing brand strategy, in partnership with Project M+
- UX/UI design for parent-facing mobile apps on iOS and Android
- UX/UI design for pick-up apps on iOS and Android
- UX/UI design for front desk, administrative, and teacher apps on responsive web
- Iterative, agile development focused on fast releases — new features live for customers as quickly as possible
- Team of four developers across markup, front end, back end, and mobile
- Dedicated project manager and quality assurance specialist
- Continuous iteration and development of new features
Register and update child profiles; book child care, workspaces, and events in one three-step workflow; pickup notifications and the safe pickup workflow with time-limited secret passwords; identity and GPS verification; buy and manage child care plans; edit pickup permissions in real time.
Accept and deny safe pickup invites; pickup-time notifications; the same secret-password workflow with identity and GPS verification.
See children in the classroom by hour with potty training status and allergies at a glance, plus full profiles one tap away: separation experience, favorite things, food preferences.
Check children in and out of care safely; check parents in and out of workspaces and events; manage accounts; make bookings and manage payments with Stripe integration and point-of-sale.
Manage every administrative function of the center — bookings, accounts, staff permissions, promotion codes, accounting and KPI tracking — and run custom reports.
“WLCM’s design focus is so unique. Our app is not just functional, but beautiful.”
We wanted to create a truly special, branded customer experience and WLCM delivered. They care as much about design as they do function. Our app is fun, simple, and so Brella! We get compliments from our families daily on how great our mobile app is.