Brightwheel Forms – Driving Adoption Through Holistic UX Improvements

Role: Staff Product Designer
Year: 2025
Team: 1 Product manager, 4 Engineers, Cross-Functional Stakeholders

Context

As a director of an early education center, there are countless forms parents must fill out—enrollment packets, allergy information, health compliance documentation, and more. Traditionally, these are printed, filled out manually, and in some cases digitized again for state compliance. The process is time-consuming, error-prone, and requires constant maintenance.

Brightwheel’s forms platform was designed to solve this by allowing centers to create and send forms digitally. But in early 2025, [DATA OPPORTUNITY: actual adoption rate or percentage of total customers using forms, e.g., “only 12% of active customers had sent a form in the past quarter”]. adoption was surprisingly low. We saw this as a huge missed opportunity to improve workflows for our customers and began an initiative to understand and address the barriers.

Research & Discovery

We started by combining quantitative analysis with qualitative insights:

  • We see drop off across the funnel with an average of 54% of users abandoned during initial form creation

 
 

  • User feedback audit from support tickets and surveys. [SPECIFICITY OPPORTUNITY: note number of tickets analyzed or most common recurring complaint, e.g., “over 30% of feedback mentioned missing field types”]

  • 8 in-depth user interviews with center directors and operators [SPECIFICITY OPPORTUNITY: include 1–2 compelling direct quotes from interviews]

 
 

Our analysis revealed two major issues:

  • Significant funnel drop-off both at the start (form creation) and after a form was created but before being shared with parents [DATA OPPORTUNITY: exact percentages for each drop-off point].

  • Opportunity far outweighed usage — customers who did adopt forms saw measurable time savings [DATA OPPORTUNITY: e.g., “reducing form processing time from 2 hours/week to 30 minutes”], but this wasn’t translating to broader uptake.

Key Pain Points

From the research, three clear themes emerged:

  1. Limited functionality
    Users often abandoned form creation because key field types were unavailable, preventing them from completing required forms.

  2. Time-consuming creation process
    Forms often needed updating each year, and creating them from scratch was tedious and repetitive.

  3. Inefficient review and approval
    Once parents submitted forms, alerts were easy to miss, approvals took multiple clicks, and not all data synced to a child’s profile. This created additional manual work for staff.

Opportunity Areas

We reframed these pain points into three solution pillars that could be delivered as incremental improvements but collectively tackle adoption barriers:

  1. Expand core functionality – Introduce high-value field types like single select, checkboxes, and drawn signature fields to enable more form types to be fully digitized, covering 85% of the field types requested by customers.

  2. Accelerate form creation – Provide ready-made templates, including pre-built fillable state compliance forms, covering the top 5 most commonly used forms and significantly reducing the effort required to get started

  3. Streamline review workflows – Improve submission visibility, reduce clicks for approvals from 5 clicks to 1, and enhance data syncing to eliminate double entry.

Design Solutions

1. Expand Core Functionality

What to Show:
  • Before: Screenshot of the old field type menu (highlight missing core field types).
  • After: Screenshot of the updated menu with new single select, checkbox, and drawn signature fields.
  • Interaction detail: A short GIF/video clip of adding each new field to a form.
Presentation Tip:
 Use a side-by-side “Before → After” layout with captions like:
Before: Limited field options prevented form completion.
 After: New fields support 85% of customer-requested types.

To remove major blockers for adoption, we introduced three high-value field types—single select, checkboxes, and drawn signature fields.

  • These fields covered 85% of the most requested customer needs, enabling directors to fully digitize the majority of their forms.

  • The design ensured each new field type followed existing component patterns for consistency, while meeting accessibility standards.

  • We validated interaction patterns with usability testing, ensuring fields worked seamlessly on both desktop and mobile.

2. Accelerate Form Creation

What to Show:
  • Template gallery: Screenshot of the new template selection screen.
  • Highlighted example: A state compliance form template open in edit mode.
  • Flow diagram: Small, simple diagram showing “Start from template” entry point vs. starting from scratch.
Presentation Tip:
 Label the template categories in your screenshot so viewers can instantly see the breadth of coverage (e.g., Enrollment, Health Compliance, Allergy Form).

We launched ready-made templates, including pre-built fillable state compliance forms and commonly used center-specific forms.

  • Templates were organized into categories for quick discovery and could be customized after selection.

  • We partnered with our compliance and content teams to ensure all state forms were accurate and kept up-to-date.

  • The new “start from template” option was placed prominently in the creation flow, reducing dependency on starting from a blank form.

3. Streamline Review Workflows

What to Show:
  • Before: Screenshot or mock showing the original 5-click approval process.
  • After: Screenshot showing the new single-click approval action.
  • Statuses in action: GIF of filtering submissions by “New” and “In Review.”
  • Profile sync: Screenshot with visual callouts on the “Fields that will sync” indicator.
Presentation Tip:
 Overlay click counts (“5 clicks” → “1 click”) directly on the images for immediate impact.

We redesigned the submissions review process to make approvals faster and data syncing more transparent.

  • Added statuses (“New,” “In Review,” “Approved”) and filtering to surface high-priority submissions first.

  • Consolidated the approval process from five clicks to one, reducing repetitive actions.

  • Introduced profile-sync indicators showing exactly which fields would update a child’s profile, reducing uncertainty and manual re-entry.