Optimizing carpool scheduling and management for busy families
Poolerz
Timeline
5 months
Role
Product Designer • Project Manager • Frontend eveloper
Team
1 PM • 1 EM • 1 Designer • 5 Developers
Tools/Skills
Figma • React • Typescript • Product Design • User Research • Frontend Engineering
Overview
How can we design an easy and accessible way for parents to manage pickups and dropoffs?
Managing schedules can be overwhelming for parents balancing school drop-offs, extracurricular activities, sports clubs, and other commitments.
Solution
Poolerz: A dynamic website for easy carpool grouping, scheduling, and management
Our team created an accessible site for families to set up, group, and schedule carpools through an efficient optimization alogrithm.
User Research
Parents' lives are busy enough. Coordinating kids' activities shouldn't make it harder.
Many families currently rely on texting groups, phone calls, or paper schedules, all methods of tracking that are hard to keep up with and harder to update.
Coordinating schedules is hard to do alone
Most parents do their carpool planning by themselves, worrying synchronizing different routes or having to be in multiple places at once
Daily lives change constantly
Parents tend to create plans multiple days in advance, but last-minute changes are a frequent struggle for their schedules
To find our product's niche, I assessed gaps in the current market
I looked at current platforms in the carpooling/rideshare space and noted the lack of interface responsiveness.
Iterations
Early low-fi concepts helped me test different ways of organizing carpools and schedules before committing to a direction.
Should users join through an invite? With a dashboard of available groups? Or should they use a join code given by the group admin?
Final Designs
From rough ideas to a product built for real families.
After iterating through feedback, testing flows, and refining the details, these final designs brought Poolerz’s core experience to life. Our interface makes carpool planning feel simple, organized, and adaptable.
Find Your Communities
Busy families need easy groups. Our platform makes it simple to create and join organizations so that families can be grouped with other members in their community.
Find current organizations through join codes and easily enter information. Don't have a group? Create one and share it with others!
Quick & Optimal Scheduling
Planning is complicated. Poolerz can help. Using our optimization algorithm, the app sorts members into groups and allots weekly driving schedules.
Based on members’ factors like distance, car capacity, and driving availability, our optimizer is able to create clusters, grouping users and ensuring less driving and less planning.
Planning - All in One
Coordinating carpools doesn’t have to be chaotic. We bring everything together with a personalized dashboard showing a schedule and drives in a clear, calendar view.
Impact & Reflection
Georgia Tech Capstone Expo: 2 semesters of work on display
What I learned…
Design and development work in tandem
My role on engineering was building the front-end of the product. Through understanding the foundation of the app, I could make more practical designs and ship better features.
Focus on what's viable
Originally, the clients had a large list of goals and ideals for their app. In order for us to hand off a minimum viable product, we focused on building out core components that parents said were key.
