Sutter Plan
Appointment-Scheduling Chatbot Design
Overview
Sutter Plan - a user-friendly chatbot
Are you familiar with the frustration of struggling with a voice bot for over 10 minutes to schedule a doctor's appointment when you're already busy and in pain? Sutter Plan, a user-friendly chatbot, aims to change that by streamlining the appointment scheduling process for all patients.
My Role
I led the conversation design of the Sutter Plan, which was created as a passion project and an answer to the problem I and many other patients face daily.
It’s a theoretical idea with the future potential for Sutter Health and other healthcare providers to adopt as their solution for further patient support.
CLIENT
Passion project
ROLE
Conversation Designer
DURATION
2 weeks
TOOL
Figma, Voiceflow
Research
“I don’t understand. Can you say that again?”
Within my user research, I’ve performed a user survey with 37 participants to identify the most common appointment scheduling pain points.
The survey highlighted user frustration with time-consuming interactions in appointment scheduling through voice technology, especially pronunciation issues, which disproportionately affect non-native English speakers. This often led to redirects to human representatives, causing redundancy and frustration, and sometimes even task failure due to time constraints and frustration.
Problem Statement
Patients fail to book a doctor's appointment, using only speech recognition technology
My survey findings drew a clear picture that the existing Sutter Health VUI isn’t sensitive to all types of patients, including those who operate in different native languages than English or face speech impairment problems. It reflects their inability to communicate with the voice assistant as per the designed happy path. Therefore, the entire experience causes many friction points and in the worst-case scenario, prevents users from completing the task.
Proposed solution
Give patients a choice: provide an easy-to-use chatbot
To address the most burning needs of current Sutter Health patients, I designed a simple, yet inclusive doctor’s appointment scheduling chatbot. Expanding the scheduling process by adding an online bot allows for an accessible experience for all types of users, including those with verbal roadblocks.
Design Process
Designing the chat
I started my prototyping process by designing a user flow.
That foundation helped to create a minimum viable chat conversation. It was important for me to take into account the findings from my research process and apply them in my chatbot design. In the error handling section, I covered not only general clarification but also placed particular emphasis on resolving potential typing errors made by non-native English speakers. This was achieved by offering a curated list of pre-selected options for them to choose from.
FINAL DESIGN
“Your appointment has been scheduled.”
The Sutter Plan MVP is live on Voiceflow. You can see the sample dialog of the doctor’s appointment booking to see how it works.
Summary
Wins and lessons learned
Increased accessibility of the service. Adding an alternative way of appointment scheduling allows users with different communication preferences and limitations, to choose the most suitable way of completing the task successfully and stress-free.
Cut appointment schedule time. As the voice-first approach is in some instances the fastest form of scheduling (available anytime, hands-free), the chatbot is a faster option in other scenarios (users with voice impairments, non-native English speakers).
Improved overall user journey. Providing patients with an alternative form of appointment scheduling allowed for a more user-centered, inclusive approach.