Your team touches a handful of screens hundreds of times a week. Two of them, the booking form and the appointment card, just had ground-up rebuilds. This is the story of why, and how we think about design.
Design is in our DNA
Two of us worked in design before Petboost, and Mo, our third founder, is a software engineer and architect by trade. Between us, detail is a bit of an obsession: the spacing, the exact word on a button, how many taps it takes to do the thing you do fifty times a day. We notice it, and we can't leave it alone.
So we invest in the design of the product constantly. Not big redesigns for the sake of it, but a steady stream of small, deliberate changes: cutting a click here, rewording a label there, watching how real businesses move through a screen and quietly fixing the bits that snag.
We're careful with it, because hundreds of businesses across Australia use these screens every single day. Change something people rely on and you had better have a good reason and a better result. We don't take that lightly.
The feedback that started it
A customer said something to us a while back that stuck:
It's great how all of the information is there, but it was so detailed. It was like going from Apple to Android. We knew something had to be done.
That is the kind of feedback we live for. We've got thick skin, big ears and keen eyes, and we'll take an honest "this is too much" over a polite "it's fine" every time. Because it means a better product for businesses across Australia.
The message was clear. The depth was right, everything you needed was there, but it took too long to find and asked too much of you to read. So we rebuilt.
The booking form
Booking is the screen your team touches more than any other. It has always handled every job, from "just pop it in the diary" to the genuinely complicated one. The rebuild kept every bit of that power and put it in far fewer clicks and a lot less scrolling.
Pick a pet and a service, and Magic Availability Check reads your real availability, your team, your rooms, your capacity and your notice periods, then shows the slots that genuinely work. It can assign the staff for you, or find times for the one person you've pinned. A colour-coded calendar shows how busy each day is at a glance before you've picked anything.
Several services and several pets from one household go on a single appointment. Add Sibling pulls up only that owner's other pets. Create and Add Pet builds a new one mid-booking. If a pet is on a package, the credit redeems as you book. It collapses to almost nothing for a solo groomer and opens right up for a multi-location team, all on the same screen.
If you want the full walk-through of everything the form can do, we wrote that up separately: Designing the ideal pet business booking form.
The appointment card
The other big one. Open an appointment and this is where you live for the next few minutes: who the pet and owner are, what's booked, what's been paid, and what to do next. It is the "everything about this booking" screen, and it had grown dense.
The rebuild was ground-up. We stripped it back and led with the one thing you always want first: the next action.
The primary button changes with the appointment's status, so you never have to hunt for it. A confirmed booking shows Check in. Once they're in, it becomes Check out. When there's money to take, it turns into Charge. One clear action, always the right one, with everything else tucked into a Manage menu so it is there without being in the way.
The header shows the handful of things you actually glance at first, the pet, its status, the service, the time and the price, and folds the rest into taps and tabs. It's the same information as before. It just doesn't shout all of it at you at once.
Underneath, the invoice went from a wall of numbers to something you can read in a second: the line items, the GST, the total, and one button to take payment.
Built to be read by everyone
This is the part we're most quietly proud of, and it's live as part of the winter update.
Good design is accessible design. We build these screens to WCAG AA contrast, keep keyboard focus visible, honour reduced-motion for anyone who has set it, and size touch targets for a tablet propped on a busy counter. Labels sit above the field, never hidden inside it. Status is never colour on its own; it's a colour, an icon and a word together, so it reads whether or not you see colour the way most people do.
Here's the thing about those choices. The same things that make a screen calmer, more contrast, more space, one clear next step, less on screen at once, are exactly the things that make it easier for someone with dyslexia or ADHD. And, honestly, for anyone checking a dog in with two more waiting and a phone ringing. Designing for the people who need it most makes it better for everyone.
Familiar, but simpler
The hardest part of an extreme makeover isn't the new design. It's not throwing away what people already know. Muscle memory is trust: checking in works the same way on the calendar, the run sheet and the appointment card, so nothing you've learned stops working. We keep the familiar and cut the clutter.
These two aren't the only ones. We've shipped a run of these makeovers across Petboost this year, each one the same balancing act: keep it familiar for the businesses who've been with us for years, and make it simpler for everyone coming to it fresh.
If you're on Petboost, both are live now. And if something still feels like one tap too many, tell us. Thick skin, big ears, keen eyes. It is how all of this gets better.
See scheduling in Petboost, or read the full Winter 2026 round-up.
