CHAITANYA GADDAMWAR
Reducing Cognitive Load in a Healthcare Appointment
Booking Flow
I helped build a 360-degree healthcare platform comprising 6 modules for multiple users, which is a core product of Azodha. Working across all modules helped me understand how the system worked and how each user group moved through it.
As the product grew, I focused on the appointment booking flow. The first step is where staff search for a patient and start scheduling. It happens multiple times a day. User testing revealed a clear problem. Many staff members were over 50 and found this step stressful. Too many options and time pressure made them slower and more likely to make mistakes.
I redesigned this step to reduce the mental load and helped staff complete bookings faster with fewer errors.
01. Initial Findings
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The front office staff were finding it extremely difficult to schedule an appointment confidently.
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They also sometimes got confused between creating new patient and scheduling an appointment.
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The Task success rate of successfully scheduling an appointment was as low as 42%.
02. People Involved in the Process
03. Digging Deeper into the Problem
I reviewed the appointment booking flow end to end to understand what the low task success rate meant in practice. I mapped every decision that the staff had to make and spotted where the flow added unnecessary steps, repeated itself, or caused hesitation.
I observed how front office staff approached the task, which steps they treated as essential, and where they expected things to move quickly. This helped me separate real usability issues from natural workflow habits.
I then brought these observations to the Product Manager and UX Lead and checked them against user testing feedback. This confirmed that the core issue was not just visual clarity, but the structure and sequence of the flow itself was the problem.
From there, I noted that most of the friction happened around patient selection and the start of scheduling an appointment. I focused my work on these areas instead of redesigning the entire flow.
04. Defining the Context
The original booking flow placed many actions inside a single journey. Front office staff had to move through multiple steps without a clear sense of priority or completion.
The existing book appointment flow had two tabs,
1. Schedule Appointment and
2. Manage Appointments
For selecting a patient for the appointment, the schedule appointment flow asks staff to lookup for an existing patient or create a new patient. The same system already allows staff to create new patients through the Manage Patients tab, which made patient creation inside the booking flow redundant. Also, the interface reveals, lookup inputs only after clicking on it and not upfront even after it being the only way to select a patient.
Overall, the flow worked, but it required high attention and constant context switching. This made the experience harder for front office staff, especially considering that most users were aged 50 and above.
05. Constraints
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Core system behaviour, validations, and backend logic could not be changed. All design improvements needed to work within existing technical constraints.
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Patient creation and validation already followed strict rules, such as mandatory email or phone number checks, which limited how much the flow could change.
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The platform supported multiple user roles, including front office staff, field staff, and providers, which restricted changes to shared screens.
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The primary users were experienced front office staff aged 50 and above, which required designs to remain familiar and avoid drastic interaction changes.
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The product was part of a white-labelling approach used across multiple clients, so visual consistency and structural flexibility had to be maintained across different implementations.
06. Design goal & Changes made
My main design goal was to reduce mental effort for front office staff during appointment booking without changing the core system behaviour.
I focused on removing early decisions that caused confusion. I did not redesign the entire workflow or introduce any new features. I kept most screens, logic, and interactions unchanged.
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I removed the Manage Appointments option from the booking flow and placed it as a separate section in the side navigation. This helped front office staff clearly distinguish between scheduling a new appointment and managing existing ones.
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I also removed the Look Up and Create New Patient actions from the initial booking step. Instead of asking users to decide what to do first, I guided them directly into patient search as the starting point of the flow.
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I decided to show the Create New Patient button only after the system returned no matching results during patient search. This prevented premature patient creation and reduced the risk of creating duplicate records. In this way, front office staff could primarily focus on finding an existing patient first and then move to creating a new patient only when the system clearly indicates that no record exists.
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I simplified time selection by grouping time slots into three clear categories: Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. I added simple icons to each option to support quick visual recognition. This reduced scanning effort and helped users identify suitable time ranges faster.
I kept all other screens, logic, and interactions the same. Appointment search, staff assignment, onboarding steps, and confirmation remained unchanged. This ensured that the redesign respected existing system behaviour and avoided unnecessary disruption.
07. Impact
These changes reduced cognitive load for front office staff and helped them complete appointment bookings faster with fewer mistakes.
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The Task success rate of successfully scheduling an appointment went up from 42% to over 70%, which meant a lot more users were able to finish the booking process smoothly. They made fewer mistakes, moved through the flow with lesser effort, and felt more confident using the system.
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Clear separation between Schedule Appointment and Manage Appointments removes early decision stress and sets the right context from the first click. Staff no longer need to pause and decide which path to take before starting their task.
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The Create New Patient option appeared only after patient search returned no results. While the system could already flag duplicate entries, this change reduced unnecessary attempts to create new patients and interruptions during appointment booking.
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Adding icons and text such as morning, afternoon and evening helped users understand availability at a glance. Icons support faster recognition, especially for older staff who rely more on visual cues than dense text, which led to reduction in time taken to complete the task.
Overall, the flow felt calmer and more predictable. Staff could move step by step without second guessing, which supports quicker bookings, fewer interruptions, and better confidence while using the system. Impact was evaluated using task completion time, error rates during patient selection, number of steps before scheduling an appointment, and qualitative feedback from front office staff.
08. Key Learnings
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Progressive disclosure made the biggest difference. Showing staff only what they needed at each step reduced decision fatigue and made the task feel more straightforward. Surfacing the Create New Patient option only after search returned no results is a small change, but it significantly reduced premature actions and duplicate entries.
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Working within tight system constraints pushed me to think more carefully about interaction design. I could not change backend logic or validation rules, so I focused on what I could control, that is information architecture, task flow sequencing, and what staff encountered first.
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Even minimal UI changes drove measurable outcomes. I did not redesign the whole flow. Reorganising the navigation, reducing early decision points, and adding visual affordances was enough to move task success from 42% to over 70%.