Developmental Insights
Helping parents understand what classroom moments mean for their child’s development.
An independent feature concept for Brightwheel, informed by parent and teacher interviews and refined through usability testing.
Problem: Parents could see classroom activities, but wanted more developmental context.
As a Montessori educator, I regularly helped families understand the learning behind everyday classroom activities. Those conversations led me to explore how a childcare app could offer similar context between conferences.
I investigated whether parents needed more than daily updates: an explanation of what their child was learning and a practical way to support it at home.
The design challenge was to make that information useful to families while keeping the experience practical for teachers and consistent with Brightwheel’s existing patterns.
Overview
Research methodologies
Insights
Parents wanted meaning and practical next steps
Research Methodologies
I interviewed 5 users, including parents, teachers, and administrators, about how they shared developmental information, what families wanted to understand, and how communication fit into their routines.
I grouped the interview findings into recurring themes. Three needs shaped the feature:
• More ongoing communication. Developmental conversations often happened during conferences or after a concern arose.
• Meaning behind the moment. Parents valued classroom updates but wanted to understand how activities connected to their child’s growth.
• Something practical to try. Families appreciated specific suggestions for supporting learning at home.
These findings shaped a simple content structure: an observation, an explanation of why it matters, and one activity to try together.
Research led me to Brightwheel’s early childhood context.
I initially considered a different education app. Comparing Seesaw, Remind, and Brightwheel led me to choose Brightwheel because its early childhood focus and frequent family communication better matched the feature.
My experience using Brightwheel helped me understand its workflows, but the comparison helped establish why it was an appropriate setting for this concept.
Affinity Mapping
I organized interview findings into an affinity map to uncover patterns across participants. This helped me prioritize developmental context and practical home activities.
Overview
Persona development
User flows
I centered the experience on concise, actionable insights
Persona Development
The personas highlighted a shared goal: parents and teachers wanted to support the child’s development, but both had limited time. Parents needed information they could quickly understand and use, while teachers needed a practical way to share meaningful observations.
This guided me toward concise, individual insights that explain an emerging skill and suggest one activity to try at home. I mapped how parents would discover, engage with, and revisit each insight while considering the time required from teachers.
User Flows
From my research findings, I created user flows to visualize how parents would discover, engage with, save, and revisit developmental insights.
Overview
Wireframes
Designing for Brightwheel’s ecosystem
Familiar Brightwheel patterns shaped the new feature
Early wireframes helped me organize the experience from receiving a notification to reviewing an insight and communicating with the teacher.
Through usability testing, I later clarified how parents’ responses reach the teacher by adding text explaining that their reaction would be sent to the teacher, alongside an option to reply to the teacher’s note.
The reaction options reflected what parents wanted to communicate and what teachers found useful to know, giving families a quick way to respond while allowing a more detailed reply when needed.
Wireframes
Designing for Brightwheel’s Existing Ecosystem
The feature was designed to complement existing communication tools rather than compete with them.
Parents could react, save, and respond to insights using interaction patterns already common throughout the app.
Overview
Usability test findings
Iterations
Testing separated saved moments from growth tracking
Usability testing
During usability testing, 5 participants, including parents and teachers, reviewed an insight, saved it, contacted a teacher, and explored suggested activities.
A key mismatch emerged: participants expected saved insights to be a collection of moments they wanted to revisit. My design also connected saving with developmental tracking, combining two purposes users understood differently.
I separated them into:
• Saved Insights: a personal collection of meaningful observations.
• Growth Journey: a place to explore developmental patterns over time.
This changed both the feature structure and navigation. Saving an insight no longer had to serve as a way to track progress.
Final Design
The final experience connects an observation to understanding and action
Parents receive a notification when a new developmental insight becomes available and can immediately review the information.
The final feature encourages engagement while providing valuable developmental context.
Parents can view patterns and growth across multiple developmental domains, creating a more holistic understanding of their child's learning journey.
Impact & Business Value
The feature encourages parents to interact more frequently with developmental content and teacher communication.
Providing context and home activities creates continuity between classroom learning and family involvement.
By delivering more meaningful value to families, the feature has the potential to increase satisfaction and long-term platform engagement.
Reflection & Next Steps
My background in Montessori education provided unique insights that informed both the problem and the solution.
As a next step, I would test the feature with a broader group of parents and early childhood educators in daycare settings to evaluate its usefulness, clarity, and fit within teachers’ existing workflows.
Their feedback would guide future iterations, including teacher approval workflows, insight management tools, and automated recommendations—further personalizing the experience and supporting long-term engagement.