about the company

Which? is the UK’s consumer champion. Their vision is to tackle consumer harm by making life simpler, fairer and safer for everyone by giving them trusted everyday advice when, where and how they need it.

my role

Senior product designer

challenge

The only way to book an appointment with a Which? legal, money or tech expert was by contacting the advice services team via phone, live chat or email. This was by far the biggest driver for calls, accounting for 40% of all inbound phone contacts. This high volume was expensive for the contact team to run and an inconvenient service for members.

Appointment booking is a very functional task for the user. However, for services such as legal, money and tech support, ensuring the user speaks to the right expert in that field is crucial. Triaging the issue was previously conducted over the phone where a trained advisor would do this for them. Our challenge was to replicate this process online but without the help of an advisor, and the user being able to do this without assistance.

goal

To create an online appointment booking journey where 80% of cases can be triaged by members without assistance.

phone appointment booking

design process

Understanding both user expectations and current business processes was crucial as a starting point. To achieve this, we conducted user interviews - testing other appointment booking services - and interviewed stakeholders to understand and map their processes. Once we had a good grasp of this information, I was able to mapped out a user journey before creating wireframes. We then tested these with real users to iron out any misunderstandings before I completed the visual designs.

preliminary research

We began by interviewing non-members to gather their past experiences with other appointment booking services. Since the pandemic, people have increasingly used online-based booking systems, especially for doctor's appointments. Participants preferred online booking systems over phone booking because they didn't have to go back and forth to confirm an appointment time. However, they worried most about booking the wrong type of appointment when given options to choose. For example, Apple asks users to choose a specific issue they are facing when booking an appointment, which requires some technical knowledge from the user. Despite this, it validated our decision to build a similar system for our services.

process mapping

I interviewed advice service members to map out their current process of booking appointments over the phone. The online journey needed to be correctly mapped to their processes in order to function. Furthermore, any potential conflicts of interest and out-of-scope topics were included to ensure the platform could handle unhappy paths.

user flows

The advice services team recently trialed a new triaging process for legal appointment booking over the phone. The goal was to improve case tracking, and the trial was successful, with over 80% of cases triaged.

I decided to replicate the triage flow in the digital journey due to its high success rate. However, I wasn't sure if it would be as successful without guidance from an advisor. Testing would be required.

user research

After ironing out the user flows, I created a prototype for testing the journey. First, I conducted an unmoderated test on usertesting.com with 8 non-members. The test was a success, with all users being able to book an appointment.

Next, we interviewed 12 members who had previous experience booking appointments over the phone with Which? We asked them to describe their emotions from ‘delighted’ to ‘angry’ for each step of the journey. We then repeated this process with the participant using the prototype. Finally, we aggregated all the insights into themes to create the comparison journey map below.

Key findings

To our surprise, the web prototype delivered a better overall experience compared to the call journey. Where emotions were below 'neutral' on both journeys, I created HMW statements as opportunities to improve the journey for future iterations. The next step is to conduct ideation sessions with the squad to improve the negative aspects of the journey and raise them to at least a 'neutral' emotion to meet user expectations.

final designs

Based on the user research findings, we made several improvements such as adding tooltips and ensuring that the date and time were displayed on the same page. To further enhance the user experience, we incorporated branding and colours into the design, bringing the journey to life and preparing it for development.

Category level 1

The first page of the triage provides the overall category to the user’s issue.

Category level 2

The second page of the triage provides more detail into the user’s issue.

Out of scope question

Depending on the user’s previous answers, we may want to find out if their issue is in scope. If their issue is out of scope we can notify the user and not waste theirs or our efforts going forward.

Calendar & time slot picker

As mentioned in the research, it was important both the date and time lived on the same page to avoid the user going back and forth between pages.

Reminder options

The research informed us that people like to receive reminders about their appointments 1 day prior.

Confirmation

Completing the journey with a summary was welcomed by participants as they felt reassured and confident completing the task.

shifting high call drivers to
self-serve experiences