Case study — Community
SitEinander — It takes a village to raise a child
SitEinander set out to build the first sharing economy for childcare: parents helping parents, within their own trusted circle of friends and neighbours. I designed the app experience — turning a warm, analog idea ("can you take the kids on Thursday?") into a digital product that felt just as personal, and fair enough that nobody had to feel guilty about asking.
Role
Product design, UX & UI
Timeline
2018 — 2019
Scope
Mobile app, brand touchpoints
The challenge
Childcare in German cities is scarce, inflexible and expensive — and the gaps always appear at the worst moments: the Kita closes early, a meeting runs late, a child gets sick. Most parents solve this informally, through friends. But informal help carries an invisible cost: the constant worry of asking too often, of owing someone, of being a burden. Paid babysitting removes the guilt but replaces it with cost and a stranger at the door.
The design problem was not connecting parents — they already knew each other. It was making mutual help feel balanced, so that asking for the third time in a month felt as easy as the first.
The approach
We grounded the concept in conversations with parents from Berlin family networks, and one insight kept returning: parents didn't want a marketplace, they wanted their existing village — digitized. Trust was non-negotiable; nobody would hand their child to a rating score. So the app was built around closed, self-curated circles of families you already know, not open matching with strangers.
The fairness problem became the core mechanic: SitPoints, a simple childcare currency. Look after someone's kids, earn points; ask for care, spend them. The point system quietly does the emotional accounting that parents were doing in their heads anyway — it converts "I owe you one" into something visible, bounded and fair, and removes the guilt from asking.
Around this core, the design focused on lowering the barrier of the ask itself: creating a care request in a few taps, broadcasting it to your circle instead of putting one person on the spot, and keeping profiles warm and personal — children's names and routines, not service-provider CVs.
The outcome
SitEinander launched in Berlin and grew a community of families organizing regular mutual care through the app, backed by a successful crowdfunding campaign and coverage as a fresh answer to the childcare gap. For me, it remains a formative project: designing for trust between real people — where the interface must step back and let the relationship do the work — shaped how I approached every product after it.