Intro

Busy Bees is an online babysitting booking app designed to help parents quickly schedule experienced, vetted babysitters in the Phoenix area. As the platform began to grow, the team identified increasing friction in early user journeys and a need to stabilize trust and conversion before scaling the product further.

The focus of this work was to reduce onboarding friction, improve clarity across key flows, and create a stronger foundation for future growth

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Problem

As the platform scaled, negative feedback increased across both parents and babysitters. Confusing onboarding flows and unclear trust signals created friction early in the experience, leading to drop-off at critical moments and putting activation and conversion at risk.

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Hypothesis

If Busy Bees could reduce onboarding friction and improve clarity without overhauling the entire product, then the team could increase activation and conversion while creating a more scalable starting point ahead of future funding and team growth.

Starting our process with a rebrand foundation

Before I was brought on, Busy Bees worked with a freelance graphic designer to establish updated branding guidelines. While reviewing the product, it became clear the existing experience was inconsistent, outdated, and not designed around user needs. These new guidelines became the foundation for creating structure and consistency across the product.

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To translate the new branding into the product, I started by building a design system

→ Busy Bees had never worked with a product team or in-house designer, making scalability a priority

→ The product lacked consistency across screens and flows, creating unnecessary friction

→ A design system provided efficiency, allowing the team to move faster and adapt as the product evolved

Our initial efforts focused on onboarding to support growth for the largest user group

Babysitters represented the largest and most active user group on the platform. The primary goal was to reduce onboarding time and improve booking efficiency by applying the newly established design system.

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The impact of our decisions on babysitter onboarding

→ 11% reduction in time spent entering the onboarding process by consolidating splash, welcome, and login/sign-up screens into a single page

→ 15% reduction in overall onboarding steps to improve retention and reduce early churn

→ Identified and corrected 10+ UI issues related to spacing, sizing, and missing instructional copy

Reducing onboarding friction for parents to increase paid conversion

Helping parents quickly onboard and confidently book a babysitter was the highest-impact conversion opportunity. This flow required clear hierarchy and guidance, especially as stakeholders planned to introduce paid memberships in the future.

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Objectives focused on supporting the startup’s tight profit margins

→ 9% reduction in the overall onboarding flow to improve conversion rates

→ Reduced confusion by improving spacing, adding help text, and removing unnecessary input fields

→ Clarified direction by improving information hierarchy and introducing a progress indicator in the parent profile flow