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Lift Club: from forty WhatsApp messages to one week view

How four parents in Umhlanga stopped losing track of who drives on Thursday.

Role
Product designer
Team
2 engineers, 1 PM
Time
10 weeks, 2026
Result
3× more swaps
The Lift Club week view: mornings and afternoons, Monday to Friday, with seats left on each lift

The problem

Parents already shared lifts. They just did it in a group chat, where a swap on Tuesday night was buried by Wednesday morning. Twice a month, a child waited at the gate.

We sat at three school gates for a week. Every parent we spoke to had screenshotted a message to remember it.

Parents and children walking into a school gate in the morning
Before: the 07:10 gate, and a phone full of messages.
A notebook of pencil sketches of phone screens beside a laptop
First try: a list, sketched in a day. Parents couldn't see the week at a glance, so we dropped it.

What shipped

One screen: the week, mornings on top, afternoons below. Each lift shows who's driving and how many seats are left. A swap is one tap and a yes from the other parent.

Each family has its own ring colour, so you can spot your days without reading a word.

Per club, per monthBeforeAfter
Messages about lifts18622
Swaps that happened413
Children left waiting20
“I haven't opened the group chat in a month. That's the review.” Thandi, parent and club starter

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