What makes a daily check-in app actually usable for older parents

The tricky thing about building software for older relatives is that you are usually not the one using it. Your sister picks the app, you set it up, and then you hand the phone to your dad. Whatever you have chosen needs to work for him on day one, with no training, no follow-up call, and no patience for buttons that mean different things in different places.

Most check-in apps I've seen don't really get this. They try to do too much. They have settings, calendars, dashboards, mood sliders. The person being looked after opens the app and immediately feels like they're being asked to do work.

One screen, one button

The clearest design change we made when building Getwello was to give the person being looked after exactly one screen. There is one big button on it. The button says "I'm well." That is the whole app from their side.

If you've ever watched your gran use a phone, you'll know why this matters. Everything that takes more than a tap is friction, and friction means it doesn't get done. A daily habit only sticks if the daily action is small.

Bigger text, by default

About a third of people over 70 have some kind of vision difficulty. Our default text size is bigger than most apps, and there is a "larger text" toggle in settings that goes bigger again. The check-in screen specifically uses a generous size with high contrast — no light grey on white.

We don't infantilise the design either. It looks calm and grown-up. Bright, busy, cartoonish design feels patronising. People notice.

No notifications they don't ask for

The Check-in Member, the person being looked after, never gets notifications they didn't choose. Every other family role gets the alerts. The person we're checking on isn't being chased.

If they miss a day, they get one gentle nudge and that's it. The escalation goes to the rest of the family, not back to them.

What we don't ask the older user to do

• Manage members
• Look at a calendar
• Read about who is visiting
• Tell us how they're feeling on a scale of one to ten
• Approve permissions

All of that is for the people helping. They use a different version of the app entirely. The parent gets the simplest possible version, not because they can't handle more, but because they don't need to. The point of a daily check-in is that it's daily.

What you can do as the family

If you are setting an app up for your mum or dad: open it on their phone yourself, log them in, leave it on the home screen, and tell them in one sentence what to do. Don't email instructions. Don't text screenshots. Pop over and show them. Once. Then leave it alone.

If they have any trouble after that, the app probably isn't right. If they can do it on day one, they'll keep doing it.

You can try Getwello here if you'd like to see what we mean.