26Health

The current online booking system was not only lacking in the necessary options, but it also had many user flow pain points that made the process undesirable to use. Users typically opted to call directly to make appointment requests because the online process was so difficult to use.

To make matters worse, it also did not directly interface with the internal CRM, so the appointment was not actually confirmed until someone reached out to the clients to get the rest of the information. There was also a concern with misinformation on some of the steps of the process that 26Health could not update easily to fix.

To start off, our team really wanted to gain a better understanding of all the pain points from both the user and client sides. We started off by going through the current experience as a user in a few different scenarios (ex. new user, returning user, seeking different appointment types, etc.) to really get a feel for places that the workflow was lacking.

We observed three main issues:

🧐   Incorrect / outdated information – much of the information about the provider was incorrect or missing completely. For example, there was an option to choose the provider you’d like to see, but only two options displayed when there were actually more options.

😶🌫️   Lack of inclusive terms and sensitivity – since one of the core principles of 26Health is to provide inclusive care, it was very concerning that the areas gathering personal information did not reflect this at all. A perfect example of where this would be a miss is when someone who has gone through transition no longer uses their legal / birth name (aka “dead name”) and now goes by their chosen name. Although it is important for medical records, knowing how the individual should be addressed during their appointment is equally important in this community.

😵💫   Uncertainty of whether or not the appointment was confirmed – although the verbage made it seem as if the user was actually booking an appointment, it was just a request that was sent to the team and would need to be followed up on. This was not apparent until the confirmation message.Additionally, we interviewed stakeholders from 26Health to see how these appointments were coming into their CRM and what types of issues they were experiencing. They expressed many similar concerns on the receiving end of what we identified with the users. Also, there were issues with individuals showing up for appointments that had not been confirmed due to the lack of communication and understanding caused by the application not interfacing directly with their internal CRM.

26Health services a large demographic of individuals in the community, but the ones primarily using the online booking tool were in their early 20s to late 30s.

After gaining a better understanding of the issues, we knew that the use of a third party system that did not interface with their internal CRM was not a viable option. As such, we sought to create a custom solution that would be able to accomplish this.

Since we were going a custom route, this allowed me to really think about every aspect of the design and steps that a user would be taking.

It was really important that I was able to address the concerns with inclusivity and sensitivity to the community, while also gathering the important information that would be necessary for each appointment.

I conducted additional interviews with each department to determine what information was important and helpful to gather before someone’s appointment. I made sure to really stress that we only wanted what was absolutely necessary in order to make the process as simple as possible for the user.

With all the information together, I set out on creating a design that would be straightforward and easy to use. I divided sets of questions into different sections and groups that were split up by pages in order to keep the feel of progress and accomplishments going. “Gamification” was an important factor, as I did not want the user to feel like this was a daunting task.

Unfortunately, upon further inspection of the CRM systems that were in use, we discovered that we would not be able to integrate directly with their system due to a lack of public APIs. This would mean we needed an alternate solution to how appointments would actually be booked.

We came up with a system that would allow the user to select their top three appointment days and times. After submission, a member of the administrative team at the office would reach out to them to confirm which of those was available within 24 hours.

I also assisted the client in setting up specific emails for each department and trained the staff on the process so we could more effectively funnel the requests to the appropriate areas.

Although not being able to connect to the CRM’s APIs was a bit of a setback, we were able to come up with a solution that worked well for both the users and the client. As a result, the client saw a huge increase in appointment bookings that came through the online portal as well as a general increase in appointments overall due to being able to direct people to a system that was easy to use. Internally, the process for handling all incoming requests was streamlined greatly by dividing them into their respective departments.

This development was ongoing as we continued to gather more data from current users and the client. The goal was to continue to work toward a more complete solution that will eventually allow users to book appointments rather than just make requests.