Taking Cara Babies

Taking Cara Babies is an industry leader in child sleep training with a massive social media following and sales volume. The company needed a custom CRM solution to integrate several 3rd-party applications. As product designer for only the first sprint of the project, I set out to design a high-impact and extensible foundation.

Background

Taking Cara Babies is a giant in their industry. Built on a strong basis of trust through social media, the company had reached a breaking point with common off-the-shelf tools they had been using to run their business since it began in 2015. The Zapier integrations they were using to perform important tasks between 3rd-party solutions were shaky at best. This was a growing problem with a high level of urgency, so our team helped to identify the most critical pain points to tackle in the first sprint.

Designing with API Data

Integrating 3rd-party applications can be a messy job, but – given the right approach – can streamline access to the most important pieces information from across multiple data sources. By working with our developers and each product’s API documentation to lay out the data available to us, I was able to design a simple yet powerful customer profile interface.

Future Flexibility

With limited time on the project, I looked ahead at features and backlog items slated for upcoming sprints to ensure the initial design left room for expansion. By adding placeholders for the next few features to be added and choosing scalable UI layouts, I was able to create some “design runway” for the rest of the team to utilize as the project continued forward.

The guaranteed successive sprints and impending new features – combined with a short design engagement – provided an environment for this approach to succeed.

Customizing Brand Colors for UI

It was important to the Taking Cara Babies team for this application to match the rest of their brand identity. Since it is not typical for branding style guides to include a wide range of shades for each brand color, I often use the provided colors as a base to create an extended palette for use in UI designs. This part of my process helps myself and software engineers on a project to design with accessibility standards, contrast, and aesthetics in mind.

The Taking Cara Babies brand included a broad set of colors and the resulting UI palettes I created have been a powerful resource for the development team moving forward.

The Results

A careful but decisive approach to design has empowered Taking Cara Babies’ custom CRM to grow successfully. Now several sprints in, the development team has continued adding new features using the design patterns and resources I established in Sprint 1.