optimising appointment booking: cutting booking errors by 12% and improving ux + usability
timeframe
skills & methods
company
industry
jan-mar 2024
usability testing | user interviews |card sort | moderated testing|accessibility|user flows | interaction design| wireframing | prototyping
Which?
B2C | consumer goods | subscription business
overview
Which? is the UK’s consumer champion - a consumer rights organisation that offers independent reviews and expert advice on a wide range of consumer products and services. This project aimed to enhance the overall user experience of the appointment booking tool for Which? Legal, Tech Support, and Money services, which gives members access to expert tailored advice.
problem
Before I joined the project, the team had launched an MVP of an online appointment booking tool for Which? members to schedule Legal, Money, and Tech Support appointments with our experts.
While the tool was functional, there were several issues:
users frequently booked appointments for topics outside the scope of our experts’ expertise
experts were often misassigned, leading to wasted time for both users and staff
These inefficiencies caused users to contact our call centre, adding to operational strain and increased service costs
The goal of this project was to address these issues by refining the booking tool to reduce booking errors, improve the accuracy of expert assignment and streamline the process to reduce costs and handling time.
By iterating the design through summative evaluation, I aimed to create a more efficient, user-friendly experience.
users
The appointment booking tool is used by Which? members with Legal, Money and Tech Support memberships, which gives them access to tailored advice from subject -matter experts. Additionally, internal stakeholders included Member Services call centre agents who assist users and subject matter experts who provide the specialised advice. These groups collectively influenced the tool’s functionality and design to ensure a seamless experience.
roles and responsibilities
As the Design Lead on this project, I was responsible for leading user research, conducting user interviews and card sorts, creating user flows, wireframes, and prototypes and iterating the design of the appointment booking tool based on user feedback.
The project team consisted of a Product Manager, Senior Engineer, Delivery Manager, Front End Engineer, QA Engineer, and Salesforce Engineer, creating a collaborative environment. We worked cross-functionally with Member Service agents and subject matter experts, ensuring diverse input throughout the design process.
scope and constraints
This project was constrained by needing to ensure that the overall design aligned with our existing tools for consistency across our product ecosystem.
Additionally, the integration of the calendar iframe further limited our control over the visual design, making full customisation challenging.
process
early insights & defining the problem
The first iteration of the appointment booking tool focused on moving the entire process from off- to online, however this MVP had several issues.
I kicked off this project by defining the problems to determine the most appropriate research methods and to ensure we could allocate resources to fixing the problems that would have the most impact. I facilitated a squad assumptions and evidence mapping workshop with key stakeholders, including from the Member Services team, to help flesh out the research objectives.
research
I conducted remote, moderated usability testing with 10 participants. This allowed me to collect rich qualitative data quickly, providing insights into users’ pain points and interactions with the tool.
Participants were asked to complete various tasks around key user journeys, such as making an appointment on a topic outside expert scope. Additionally, I included survey questions to supplement this and to capture further evidence about the broader experience.
analysis
I analysed video and screen captures, coding data by sentiment and usability criteria. Using a thematic analysis, I identified key usability issues and prioritised them based on a severity rating scale to help determine the most important issues to address.
key findings
categorisation issues
Users struggled with query categorization due to overlapping options and confusing labels. They frequently chose the wrong categories, contributing to booking errors and higher call volumes.
broken journeys and dead ends
Users often hit dead ends in the triage process but continued attempting to book, often blaming themselves for the ‘errors’. This revealed a need for clearer out-of-scope messaging.
usability issues
The tool's UI had problems, including inaccessible colour contrast in the iframe calendar and underutilises tooltips.
reflections
outcomes
These findings guided improvements in query categorisation, triage flow and UI, enhancing the overall user experience of the booking tool.
I conducted an open and closed card sort with 12 participants which helped to refine and add clarity to the case options. I also set up a feedback loop with the Member Services team to monitor case types that were most frequently being miscategorised.
I also refined user journeys and ‘dead end’ messages for issues that were out of scope to make it clearer when a topic isn’t covered by our experts to manage user disappointment. Additionally I providing better onward journeys to content on relevant topics.
Finally, I makes made changes to the UI to resolve the identified issues. For example, my research uncovered that many users were completely ignoring the tooltips (which explained what kind of issues were included in a particular category) intended to help users correctly categorise their query. Upon further investigation if became clear that
Overall, we saw a 12% reduction in booking error and overall reduced calls to our Member Services team in the first few weeks of these changes being launched.
lessons learned
I came into this project to a team who had already worked together for a while and whose morale was quite low. Because there hadn’t been any designers on the project before me joining the team, my arrival meant a new dynamic, which wasn’t easy initially.
I realised that I needed to earn the trust of my new team members and made efforts to get to know the team individually, how they prefer to work and communicate and ensured I shared design work early with engineers to scope out the work. There are a number of limitations in this project due to the technologies involved, and I found that gaining a deeper understanding of how they worked, gave me better insight into feasibility and limitations from a technical perspective which made communicating with engineers much smoother.