GrandPad Apps

GrandPad provided iOS and Android companion apps that let family members communicate and share photos with seniors using the GrandPad tablet. These apps functioned as private social networks but had diverged in features and visual design. The Android app had fallen behind functionally, and neither app followed platform design guidelines consistently.

I approached the iOS redesign first to establish the visual direction for both platforms. Three key priorities guided the work:

Platform-native patterns: The existing apps mixed custom UI patterns with inconsistent implementations of OS standards. Without time to build a unified design system across platforms, I chose to lean into Human Interface Guidelines for iOS and Material Design for Android. This approach would help users navigate more intuitively while reducing development complexity.

Improved photo comments: Comments from the GrandPad tablet came in both text and audio formats, but the UI didn't differentiate them clearly. Voice comments particularly needed better visual treatment and playback controls.

Notification management: Users had no way to review past notifications within the app. Adding a notification center would solve a frequent support request and improve engagement with new content.

The final designs implemented standard bottom navigation on both platforms. During development, we simplified the iOS approach—the shipped version uses a standard tab for "New Post" instead of the overlay button shown in my initial designs.

After family members received invitations to join the private network, they could create accounts directly within the app. The onboarding flow included profile photo selection, helping establish identity within the family group from the start.

The photo feed served as the primary interface—any photo shared from a GrandPad tablet or companion app appeared here for the entire family. I designed card-based layouts that displayed the poster's name, timestamp, and comment count for quick scanning.

Based on user feedback about complex family dynamics, I added the ability to hide posts from specific contacts. This acknowledged that all-or-nothing sharing models don't always work for real families.

Each family member had a dedicated contact screen showing their shared photos and communication options. Through user research, we discovered that the local weather display for each contact was surprisingly valuable—grandparents often started conversations by asking about the weather.

Voice comments received the most significant improvements. I added play/pause controls and duration indicators, addressing complaints that some family members left very long audio messages. The waveform visualization provided visual feedback during playback.

For context preservation, I designed a collapsible preview bar that showed the photo thumbnail and caption as users scrolled through comments. This proved especially useful when users arrived at comments via notifications—they could maintain visual context without the photo taking up the full screen.

The comment input field now expanded to accommodate multiple lines of text. This let users review longer comments before posting.

Each post also included a dedicated full-screen photo view for a more immersive gallery experience.

Android leveraged the Floating Action Button pattern, expanding to reveal photo source options (camera, or existing photos). This followed Material Design conventions while providing quick access to the primary user action.

In a subsequent update, we added multi-photo posting capabilities. The review screen displayed all selected photos in a grid with a single caption field, avoiding the complexity of per-photo captions while giving users confidence about their selections.

The new notification center provided a chronological list with native swipe gestures for marking notifications as read. This central location for reviewing missed interactions addressed one of our most common support requests.

The platform's video calling feature supported calls between GrandPad tablets and companion apps in any configuration.

Both apps launched successfully and are available on the App Store and Google Play Store. The redesigns improved platform consistency while maintaining the features that made GrandPad valuable for connecting families.

Looking back, I would have pushed harder for a unified component library despite the timeline constraints. While platform-native patterns served us well, maintaining two distinct codebases created ongoing maintenance challenges. The notification center proved particularly valuable—engagement metrics showed users checking missed content more frequently after its addition.

The voice comment improvements had the most immediate impact on user satisfaction. Support tickets about "can't hear grandma's message" dropped significantly after we added playback controls and duration indicators. Sometimes the most important design work addresses the small frustrations that users encounter daily.