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Making The System Work Harder Than The Human
We were paying monthly for a tool that made providers build their own workarounds just to trust their own calendar.
The Product
Skin Clique connects patients with board-certified aesthetic providers for in-home treatments like tox, filler, and chemical peels.
Patients book appointments directly with providers through the website, and providers drive to their house to administer treatment.
Providers used a third party tool to manage these appointments.
The Problem
Providers were complaining about scheduling issues. We heard things like:
- "I sometimes forget to block off time and patients book when I'm not really available."
- "My patients usually book at bad times, so I just book for them instead."
- "For every minute I spend treating patients, I spend double managing my schedule."
- "I was tired of handling it all, so I asked the support team about getting a virtual assistant to do it for me."
With appointments failing to land and providers experiencing what we call user fatigue, we dug deeper into why this was a problem.
The Cause
The third-party application providers used for managing their appointments was made for brick and mortar med-spas, and it showed.
- You could only define one set of available working hours. Any other time blocks had to be manually added every time for each day.
- Booked appointments synced to external calendars unreliably, and the connection went stale after 30 days. Some providers added them manually to personal calendars.
- Buffer and travel time between appointments wasn't a setting. They added them by hand for each appointment to avoid racing to the next house.
After a number of user interviews, we found countless ways that providers had built different manual systems to cope with the lack of support.
The Major Insight
After learning of the workarounds and crazy systems our providers were using (seriously, one tried using Zapier) we realized they all led back to one problem: availability was a global setting that needed particular adjustments.
If a provider's availability was an accurate picture, most of these workarounds disappear.
Providers viewed their availability through the lens of their appointments and locations and the tool didn't.
This mismatch with the tool is best explained by a psychology concept called a mental model.
A mental model is the internal picture someone forms of how a system works, built from experience.
The Hypothesis
By reframing mental models around a clear availability hierarchy:
Appointment Type > Availability > Details and Rules.
Providers could transfer this insane cognitive load of managing availability, and everything related to it, to the system as children of an appointment type.
The Solution
We introduced a new way to manage availability by allowing providers to define their availability at the appointment type level, rather than having one global setting and then having to manage it manually with time blocks.
Location, service, and other conditionals all moved from something a provider had to hold in their head, and manually reconstruct, into a child element the system could hold instead. A provider could set it up once, per appointment type, instead of fighting one global calendar every week.
The Results
The setup got even our most complex-workaround providers through without extra explanation. Whatever mental model they'd brought with them, they only had to apply it once per appointment type, not maintain it by hand every week.
I wish we could claim something like "XX% reduction in manual calendar edits per provider, per week," but in reality our best metric is the reduction in complaints regarding time spent managing their schedule.
Providers who've onboarded are already putting that reclaimed time back into their practice, or their families.
"...design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself."
