CASE STUDY · CARINGBRIDGE
Making it easier to ask for help
Reimagining an underused planning tool into a seamless way for communities to offer support.
REQUESTS
Support, right where the conversation is already happening.
Meals
Transportation
Visits
01. THE OVERVIEW
Making support part of the conversation
Asking for help isn’t always easy, especially when navigating a health journey. CaringBridge previously offered Planner, a standalone calendar-based tool for families coordinating support. As part of the platform migration and redesign, we saw an opportunity to make that support more accessible, intuitive, and integrated into the experience people already knew.
COMPANY — CaringBridge
ROLE — UX/UI Designer
PLATFORMS — Responsive Web & Native iOS
02. THE CHALLENGE
A helpful idea, hidden behind extra steps
The original Planner lived on its own page and relied on a calendar-based interface. While the intention was valuable, the experience felt disconnected from how people naturally interacted with CaringBridge. Our challenge was to preserve Planner’s purpose while removing unnecessary complexity and bringing support to the feed.
How might we make asking for and offering help feel like a natural part of the CaringBridge experience?
03. THE SOLUTION
From a separate tool to a simple post
We reimagined Planner as Requests, allowing CaringBridge authors to create requests for everyday needs and share them directly within their page’s feed. Visitors can view requests alongside regular updates and offer to help without navigating to a separate planning tool.
Transportation
Childcare
Meals
Pet care
Household chores
Errands & visits
04. MY ROLE
Designing a consistent experience across platforms
As a UX/UI Designer, I helped bring Requests to life across responsive web and native iOS. I designed intuitive flows and interfaces for creating, viewing, and accepting requests, while ensuring the experience felt consistent with the broader CaringBridge product. I partnered closely with product managers and engineers, supported developer handoff, and performed visual QA through implementation.
User experience design
Interaction design
Cross-platform visual QA
Developer handoff
05. THE IMPACT
Less friction, more meaningful support
By integrating Requests directly into the feed, we removed the need for users to navigate to a separate calendar-based tool. The redesigned experience made it easier for authors to communicate their needs and for visitors to offer practical support. Following the redesign, Requests saw more frequent use compared with the legacy Planner experience—and became a natural extension of how people already connected on CaringBridge.
06. LOOKING AHEAD
Building on a simpler foundation
Requests launched with a focused set of capabilities, with future opportunities to support multiple time slots within one request and add helpful context such as location. The takeaway: improving a feature isn’t always about adding more functionality—it’s about making it easier to discover, understand, and use within the experience people already know.