One family. Two schools. One account.

The way a system stores information quietly shapes what a person can do with it.

In RouteEd, a useful question is what a parent should see when children in the same family attend different schools.

Start with the real relationship.

The parent thinks in terms of their family. If the interface only reflects one school at a time, the system can fail to represent that family clearly.

Look beneath the page.

This kind of problem is about more than rearranging a list. It involves the relationships between accounts, children and schools, together with the permissions needed to show the right information.

Keep requests distinct from membership.

A pending request is not the same as an approved relationship. Good product work needs to make those states understandable without losing sight of the user’s actual situation.

This is a note from ongoing product work, not a release announcement. The principle is simple: model the real life first, then design the screen around it.