Problem

Members are having a hard time finding coaches’ availability to schedule a consultation.

Activation within a member’s first week is a key contributor to long term retention. During periods of high volume, in and around customer launches, it becomes increasingly difficult to find coaches with availability for consultation scheduling.

Defined Challenge

Make consultation scheduling as easy as possible.

Current consultation flow a customer will go through. 

Understand the Problem

What are the problems with the consultation scheduling in the product end?

Through user interviews with coaches and clients, we discovered a few pain points here:

1. Limited availability. Users can only view 6-days availability into the future and often view days that could have 0 availability.
2. Limited time duration. Users can only set up a consultation of fixed time duration. (initial consultation 40 mins, follow up consultation 30 mins), but it often doesn’t take that long, some shorter available time slots were wasted
3. Limited edit access. Users have to message their coach to set up a follow-up consultation and reschedule a consultation. 

Product Requirements

What are the possible approaches to these problems?

Based on the discussion we had with the dev team and product team, we refined the requirements to ensure they can make much maximum impact without adding massive engineering effort.

1. Unblock availability. Allow a user to only view dates with availability and look at all future days of availability.
2. Two options of time duration. Members can schedule flexible time slots of 30 or 15 mins only for follow-ups.
3. Unblock follow-up consults. Users can schedule follow-up consults when they want, without requiring coach permission or confirmation.

Brainstorm

What is the mental model of scheduling an appointment?

To start off, we rethink the scheduling flow. There is an argument around the mental model of scheduling from a calendar view vs. a 3-day view. We conducted a usability test to inspire the new consult scheduling UX designs, and to observe and record which calendar view they preferred and why. 

Takeaway

Most of our users think about which dates work over which times and so prefers the calendar view.

Calendar view: It works much better because they can see the month out. 

3-day view: They didn’t want to see a whole grid of days, especially if those days didn’t work for them. They don’t want to shift through days that don’t work for them.

Brainstorm 

What are some possible calendar view scheduling alternatives?

I looked up different scheduling features on the market and came up with 3 directions of scheduling through a calendar view.

Iteration

What are changes being made based on the new idea?

Set up the first consultation flow

Set up a follow-up consultation flow

Feedback

It might cause mistakenly touching unintended time slots.
The consultation info page and confirmation page could be consolidated into one page.
etc…

Final Design

Set up the first consultation flow

Set up a follow-up consultation flow

Summary

What is the result?