THE PROBLEM
A navigation failure hiding in plain sight
Employees arriving at BrightHorizons.com to access childcare benefits couldn't figure out how to log in. The homepage presented multiple portals, confusing terminology, and competing calls to action — none of which clearly pointed to the right login path.
The term "Family Information Center" appeared throughout the site. Users had no idea what it meant. They were guessing, failing, and leaving. Employers were noticing. During renewal conversations, the login experience came up as a reason teams questioned the ROI of their benefits investment.
| "It wasn't clear that this is where you find childcare. I didn't know I was heading towards the FIC until I arrived." — Usability test participant
Solving it required coordinating between two teams: marketing owned the homepage, product owned the portals. Any solution had to work across that boundary.
Legacy login page for BrightHorizons.com
01
Not clear to users that this is the portal for their preschool and day-care
02
Not a service by itself; Elder Care is contained in the Back-Up Care services
03
Often confused with EdAssist and is not always offered by all participating employers
04
No login button; Portal needs the employer before the user can login
RESEARCH
Two rounds, two different things to learn
I ran the research in two phases. The first was designed to test three competing solutions. The second was designed to get closer to the real user.
Phase 1: 15 participants across the US and UK, recruited via UserZoomGo. Participants were divided across three prototype groups: a dropdown, a button design, and a modal. Each completed the same task — find and log into their childcare benefits — under realistic conditions.
Phase 2: 5 internal Bright Horizons employees who actively used childcare centers. Their feedback surfaced copy problems the broader group hadn't caught. "Choose a benefit" didn't land. The double login felt redundant. "Child Care Center" was clearer than "Family Information Center" for anyone who didn't already know the product.
That second round shaped the final copy before anything went to engineering.
DESIGN DECISION 01
The org constraint that settled the design decision
The dropdown failed immediately. 0% task success. Users on mobile couldn't find it, and those who did couldn't distinguish between options without context. That one was easy to rule out.
The button and modal prototypes both hit 60%. On raw numbers, no winner. But the decision wasn't really about the numbers.
BrightHorizons.com Dropdown
0% task success
Hidden on mobile. No context for options. Users couldn't distinguish between portals.
Enterprise Login Button
60% task success
More visible. But directing users off-site mid-journey created a cross-team dependency on every copy change.
Login Modal on Marketing Site
60% task success
Same success rate, but kept users on the marketing site. More room for helper text. One team controlled the experience end to end.
The modal kept users on the marketing site throughout the flow. The button design handed them off to a product-managed portal mid-journey, which meant any copy change required coordination across two teams. That was a dependency we couldn't control at the speed we needed to move.
More importantly, the modal gave us room to actually fix the problem. Users weren't failing because of the visual design. They were failing because "Family Information Center" meant nothing to them. A modal gave us space for helper text without touching the portal architecture.
Click Login
Portal Selection
Benefit Selection
Username
Password / OTP
DESIGN DECISION 02
The copy change that mattered more than the layout
The first version of the modal had personality. It also had the wrong words.
Internal testing flagged three specific problems. "Choose a benefit" felt odd to users who didn't think of their childcare as a "benefit." The yellow button stood out but didn't signal where it would take them. And "Family Information Center" appeared nowhere until users had already clicked through to it.
At this point, marketing and product had different instincts about what to call things. I brought the usability data into a joint review with both teams. The numbers made the case: users recognized "Child Care Center" immediately and hesitated on "Family Information Center" every time. We aligned on plain language across both sides of the experience.
The final modal removed visual clutter, added a plain-language label, and gave each option a one-line description of where it would take the user. Users in the second round called it "the most intuitive" of the three approaches.
Not all services are employer-sponsored benefits
Unclear what these buttons mean and why FIC is the primary
BEFORE
Lots of personality without context
While the first solution had lots of personality and color, it lacked the context needed for the user.
AFTER
Minimalist became the most intuitive
Removing a lot of distractions and colors became the answer for the most intuitive modal.
More generalized to accommodate different personas
Changed to "Child Care Center" for the sake of plain language
Extra helper text for context and removed unneccessary heirarchy of buttons
OUTCOME
70%
Decrease in user drop-off
90%
Users able to self-correct eligibility errors
35%
Increase in user satisfaction
7%
Decrease in login-related support tickets
RETROSPECTIVE
What I'd do differently
The research-first approach worked. Testing three options before committing to one saved development time and gave us data to align stakeholders across two teams. That was the right call.
What I'd change: I'd bring the internal Bright Horizons employee group into research earlier. Their feedback on the "Choose a benefit" copy and the double-login confusion surfaced problems that the external group hadn't flagged. We caught it in time, but running that segment earlier would have shaped the modal copy before final designs rather than after.
Danielle Pirone
Enterprise Product Manager
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