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Online Appointment Scheduling

Streamlining appointment scheduling to increase user completion rates.

Feature prioritization and optimization process of a mature product.

Summary:

I spearheaded a UX-centric initiative aimed at improving the scheduling completion rates for nurse appointments on an enterprise Online Scheduling platform. Despite supporting 50K appointments monthly across various channels, the platform faced challenges in guiding users to successfully complete their scheduling. My approach encompassed a highly collaborative redesign of the 'Review Appointment' step, leveraging data analytics, and A/B testing to drive a significant uplift in completion rates.

Team Members:

UX Designer, UX Writer, Content Strategist, UX Research, Product Owner, Data Analytics team, A/B Testing team, Solution Architect, Lead Developer

Primary Roles:

Product Manager,

UX Support

Timeframe:

February '22 - March '22

Client:

Anonymized Healthcare Company

Empathize:

​To dissect the user journey and identify friction points, we delved into consumer usage data, collaborating closely with the Data Analytics Team to pinpoint areas adversely affecting the appointment scheduling rate, particularly the 'Review Appointment' step.

KPI Analysis: We focused on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as the Appointment Schedule Rate and the No-Show Rate, with special attention to the discrepancies between new bookings and reschedules, as well as between consumer-initiated and nurse-assisted appointments. We mapped the KPIs into the specific member experience steps impacted.

Identified Opportunities: The insights gained led to list of potential feature enhancements ideas to improve the user experience. The ideas were categorized in two buckets:

  1. Consumer-facing enhancements which were more recognizable to consumers

  2. Product strategy ideas that are less visible to consumers or required more definition before prioritizing

The Signal in the Noise: User Feedback and Structured Prioritization

1. For the 'consumer-facing enhancement' ideas, we conducted user survey prompting users with specific feature ideas in the context of user scenarios and asked them to rank them in terms of their usefulness. 

User Survey: Surveyed 337 US adults to determine priority for implementing features. Survey results informed how the product prioritized these features on the roadmap.

Idea Prioritization: We voted on the 'Category 2' ideas so that we could focus on refining the top priority ideas further. We used this criteria: perceived impact to KPIs (ex. No-show rate), Effort, # of impacted users, UX Severity. Ideas with most votes were prioritized for our team to further analyze, ideate and prototype.

2. For the 'product strategy' ideas, we prioritized them amongst our internal team.

Ideate:

The Focal Point is Revealed

The focal point became the 'Review Appointment' step, identified as a critical drop-off point for 24% of users who fail to schedule their appointment.

Content Audit: Through a comprehensive content audit, in collaboration with UX Writers and Content Strategists, we discovered ambiguities in the messaging, prompting us to redesign the review step to make it more intuitive. Specifically, we found that the copy messaging did not clearly indicate that an additional step needed to be performed to schedule the appointment

Competitive Analysis: Through an examination of nine competitive scheduling flows, we unearthed four distinct approaches to the review step, offering valuable benchmarks for our redesign. We also found that the Call-to-Action (CTA) on the Review step was not consistently above the fold across all devices.

Prototype:

Crafting Clarity in the Review Appointment Step

In partnership with UX Designers and Accessibility experts, we crafted alternate designs for the 'Review Appointment' step, focusing on clarity of messaging and the visibility of the CTA across devices.​

Test:

Validating Impact Through A/B Testing

A/B Testing: We conducted multiple rounds of A/B testing, aiming to refine the design based on engagement metrics. The winning designs demonstrated a clear preference for streamlined messaging and improved CTA visibility.

Test Hypothesis:

By updating the headline and adding subhead with clarifying copy, we’ll more clearly communicate to the user the desired action on the page, which will result in more CTA clicks and less fallout from this page.

Test Hypothesis:

Reducing the spacing between the components will bring the primary “Schedule” CTA above the fold on desktop, along with making it sticky in mobile will increase users visibility of the desired action on the page, which will lead to more CTA clicks and less fallout from this page.

Across the two A/B tests the combined lift was 4.4%, so we added the feature to the development roadmap.

Final Solution:

A Leap in Scheduling Completion Rates

We released the redesigned 'Review Appointment' step that included clearer instructions and a more prominent CTA. Post-launch, we monitored the impact, which was an increase of nearly 6% in scheduling completion rates, validating the effectiveness of the user-centered redesign.

Lessons Learned

  • Impact: The redesign led to a near 6% increase in the scheduling completion rate, affirming the effectiveness of our user-centered approach.

  • Lessons Learned:

    • The project underscored the value of close collaboration with analytics teams for data-driven insights and highlighted the importance of inclusive ideation processes.

    • Our work showed a need to enhance some of the KPI dashboards.

  • What happened Next?:

    • I hosted dedicated roadmap planning meetings to look ahead at the roadmap and backlog with a wider audience of design and IT.

    • We formalized UX Severity Scale to make it a clearer rubric for scoring feature ideas.

    • The team worked through the next round of feature ideas from the backlog and shared our process within our department and beyond.

Interested in learning more?

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn, email me at eggamradt@gmail.com or contact me below.

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