Doctap needed us to make them the go-to, desktop-focused platform for booking same-day GP doctor appointments online, hoping to provide a seamless, efficient, and reliable experience for our users, resulting in an increase in the booking rate on our product.
A little bit of help me help you.
In order to get busy professionals in and out of GP consults faster and easier, we focused on updating Doctap's visual identity and slimming down their desktop booking experience, cutting down the users' time to book by nearly 21%.
Overall, our findings indicated that the checkout flow experience is challenging and unclear navigationally and trustworthiness is low, Doctap is in dire need of implementing design principles and staples of HCI commonly found in their competitors. Speaking of which …
Adjusting our perspective to understand that the healthcare system in the UK is quite different than it is in the US, we chose to compare to clinics offering similar services to busy professionals in the US, namely Carbon Health and Zocdoc. Carbon Health provided a lot of aesthetic inspiration while Zocdoc proved to us that booking a doctor's appointment didn't need to feel overwhelming.
Doctap was having trouble getting people to their clinics due to their complicated booking experience and lack of trustworthiness thanks to their visual design. It was our job to simplify this and instill trust in Doctap for our users.
After our research and competitive benchmarking, our team felt we had enough data to begin ideating. We performed a quick crazy eights exercise to get us into our creative zones and got straight to work on low fidelity prototyping.
With a little more focus coming out of our research and ideation phases, we dove into prototyping filled with inspiration and ideas. We looked to booking apps like our competitors and others like Google Flights to inspire our rounds and rounds of low-fidelity prototyping. Making the booking experience as seamless and quick as possible, we worked out several flows that we wanted to take over to our high-fidelity prototyping.
For this project, my team and I decided to give Doctap a targeted facelift. A good number of sites out there need a touch-up, but we wanted to make sure our adjustments fit the needs of the user and solved our business problems. We decided to lean into a more organic color palette, focusing mainly on a monochromatic array of red hues instilling confidence in the booking process and the service as a whole.
High Fidelity Prototype
Our final, high fidelity prototype was built from the ground up to simplify the booking experience for our users. The main goal for Doctap was to dramatically lower the booking time for the user. Our research subjects all were busy professionals just starting out in their career, and when we interviewed them they constantly mentioned their frustrations with lengthy online forms and checkout flows. We understood that removing the payment step (a significant chunk of the booking time) was required for appointment retention, but felt that unnecessary checkout drop downs could be removed to speed up the booking process.
Getting to this state was challenging and required several design explorations for just one of our flow pages. However, having experimented with different elements, all focused on giving the user a trustworthy and easy experience, we are proud of our end result. During these explorations, we looked to our competitors to see how they implemented more intuitive, user-friendly features like our condensed payment entry fields and our progress bar.
How best to test the speed of our booking flow revisions? We went back to our research subjects and had them fill out forms for a general practitioner appointment in both experiences and provide their feedback. This was done in person, with the test subjects using a computer in front of them while the researcher timed the experience and took down remarks about the experience as a whole.
Our subjects on average completed the new booking flow roughly 21% faster than they did when booking through the current Doctap interface. While we're extremely excited about these changes, we tested as if the user was a first time visitor and did not have a profile set up. While the booking flow would be faster for both flows (new and current) allowing for our users to sign in and select an appointment would likely dramatically expand the gap between each flow's completion time.
If we were to be given more time, I believe our team would continue on our usability audit of the entire site and revise their visual identity further. Our time constraints were tight (learning simultaneously during this project), and I feel that we would have loved the opportunity to continue throughout the secondary and tertiary pages of Doctap to fully overhaul their visual identity to further build user trust. Looking forward to the opportunity to revisit this project and expand further!