IMPACT
+34% 'Book Now' button CTR
+438% Banner Ads CTR
+8.5% 'Call Now' button CTR
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
Small Agile Team of PM and Developers
Booking At Scale
HEALTHSHARE • 2023 — 2024
Situation
HealthShare is Australia’s leading healthcare directory, helping patients find the right providers through detailed practitioner profiles and over 9,700 referrals daily.
In 2023, HealthShare acquired MyHealth1st, a booking platform, with a strategic goal: to convert our directory into a bookable marketplace where patients could seamlessly schedule appointments online.
However, our existing website had not been updated in over eight years. It was optimised solely for profile discovery — not for direct bookings. To bridge this gap, we initiated a platform-wide redesign focused on scaling booking infrastructure, improving usability, and supporting upcoming partnerships like HCF’s "Find a Provider" upgrade.
Complication
The project surfaced several design and operational challenges:
Less than 5% of profiles had booking links, most redirecting offsite to third-party pages.
We needed to support four profile types — practitioners, practices, groups, and hospitals — each with distinct data schemas and booking behaviours.
Displaying availability across multi-location clinics and large-scale groups (100+ locations) demanded a scalable information architecture.
We faced tight timelines and limited engineering capacity, with HCF’s request adding urgency and strategic scrutiny.
This wasn’t a cosmetic redesign — it was about replatforming HealthShare to unlock transaction value at scale.
Question
How Might We Build a Scalable Booking Flow Across Diverse Profile Types?
We defined four core UX questions to guide our design work:
How might we show real-time availability for practitioners across multiple clinics?
How might we allow bookings across multiple practitioners at a single practice?
How might we make large practice groups with 100+ locations easy to navigate?
How might we structure hospital profiles with complex, multi-departmental services?
Answer
As the lead product designer, I worked closely with our PM and engineers to define modular patterns that could adapt across all provider types. Given our constraints, we focused on fast iteration cycles — prototyping, internal testing, and refinement — to de-risk early decisions.
Answer
Cycle 1 — Exploring Initial Concepts
I developed and presented three booking availability concepts to internal stakeholders:
Option 1: Single “Book” CTA with the next available date
→ Simple but lacked detailed slot visibility.
Option 2: List of available slots for the current day
→ Preferred by some but infeasible due to backend limitations.
Option 3: Two-week calendar showing upcoming availability
→ Helpful for comparisons but didn’t handle multi-practitioner practices well.
We decided to combine elements from Options 1 and 3 to balance visibility and consistency across provider types.
Answer
Cycle 2 – Testing Combined Concept
I prototyped a combined design and conducted tests with 8 internal users, uncovering:
Confusion from multiple CTAs
Brand-coloured buttons failing accessibility checks
I refined the design by simplifying the layout and improving contrast for readability.
Answer
Cycle 3 – A/B Testing Profile Layouts
To address the complexity of multi-practitioner practices, I ran an A/B survey with 10 colleagues:
Option A: Dropdown selector for practitioners/locations
Option B: Card-based view displaying all practitioners/locations with availability
7 out of 10 preferred Option B for ease of scanning and reduced interaction cost. We moved forward with Option B while enhancing visual clarity and accessibility.
Answer
Cycle 4 – Final Usability Validation
I conducted 5 moderated usability tests using real-world booking scenarios. Key findings included:
Arrow buttons for date navigation were too subtle
Users struggled to find practitioner profile and location hyperlinks
I refined button prominence and improved link visibility to enhance discoverability.
Answer
Final design
We enhanced the booking experience across key pages to improve usability, accessibility, and decision-making for users:
Directory Page: Added clearer booking options with a calendar-style or single button, and updated colours for better consistency and accessibility.
Practitioner Page: Availability is now shown in a simple table by location, with a dynamic map for more detailed directions.
Practice Page: Users can see which practitioners work at the practice and compare their availability.
Hospital & Practice Group Pages: Practitioner cards are shown without booking buttons, and users can select specific locations to view.
Outcome
To deliver value quickly, we launched a simplified single-CTA booking interface while laying the groundwork for richer flows.
📈 Results from first 60 days post-launch:
+34% increase in ‘Book Now’ CTR
+8.5% increase in ‘Call Now’ CTR
+438% increase in banner ad CTR
The project also positioned HealthShare as a viable end-to-end platform for partners like HCF, who adopted the new components for their member site.
Reflection
This project deepened my understanding of transactional UX at platform scale. I learned that:
Scalability starts with pattern thinking: By designing composable modules that worked across four profile types, we built a foundation for system-wide rollout without redesigning per use case.
User IA mental models matter: Our later research revealed that patients often search by location first, not practitioner — especially in dental. That insight has since informed our shift toward proximity-first search flows.
Small UI shifts can unlock big behavioural outcomes: Many improvements (e.g., booking button clarity, mobile layout hierarchy) were modest — but collectively moved the needle.
What We’re Doing Now
Building on our learnings from the initial redesign, we are now actively expanding our focus to deepen patient-centred insights while aligning improvements with user needs and partner goals.
🏥 We discovered that many users, especially for services like dentistry, expect to find practitioners based on location first, not individual profiles. To align with this mental model, we’re experimenting with proximity-based flows that automatically surface the most relevant location.
👥 Moving beyond internal testing, we are conducting guerrilla A/B tests directly with patients in clinics using prototypes and live flows. This ensures our decisions reflect how real users search, navigate, and book, not just assumptions from within the team.
🔬 To stay lean while testing, we are prioritising lightweight experiments that can be implemented with minimal engineering effort while still generating meaningful insights. This is particularly important as we prepare for our upcoming HCF partnership, which will bring more practice-based booking flows to the platform.
Each experiment is tracked for its impact on conversion, scroll depth, and user engagement, ensuring we learn what truly reduces friction and supports more confident bookings.
Through these ongoing efforts, we aim to elevate the patient booking experience from a functional transaction to an intuitive, confidence-building journey while ensuring our platform remains scalable and aligned with business priorities.