Intermountain Health + UserTesting

The Intermountain Product team started by using web analytics to evaluate their existing scheduling experience.  They observed that patients scheduling through the workflow for a new provider had significantly lower completion rates than patients scheduling with providers they had previously visited. Evaluating data from in-app surveys, monthly surveys, and app store reviews, etc. helped them understand why customers more frequently abandoned the scheduling process for visits with new providers. It’s a more complex decision process for a patient, as the patient considers pursuing a new doctor-patient relationship. Patients want to understand availability, location, and quality of the provider—as quickly as possible. Scheduling appointments with an existing provider does not involve these same complexities.

Tucker Christiansen explains, “Armed with this data, we had a theory that by making it easier for the patient to see all of the key information earlier in the flow, they could more easily make this decision and choose the best provider that met their needs. As such, we planned a major redesign of the new provider scheduling workflow.” 

Availability presented a challenge in the old flow, as it took four clicks from the list of providers page to reach the availability screen for a single provider. That’s a lot of clicking back and forth when comparing the availability of multiple providers. The Product team developed a prototype that showed the availability of providers directly on the list, thereby eliminating the extra clicks. They also included the providers’ ratings and further details about their physical addresses. 

Usability testing was a key part of the prototyping process. Intermountain ran three rapid, back-to-back usability tests to test iterations of the new layout. The Product team was concerned they might overwhelm the user with details on the first page, but the test participants were easily able to complete the scheduling task with the new versions and provided valuable insights with each iteration. These usability tests gave Intermountain confidence to proceed with a solid prototype into development that they felt would simplify the user experience and outperform the prior version.  

This usability testing also saved them a significant amount of time. If they had rushed to build the first version, then iterated on it in production, it would have taken several more months—and significantly more engineering cost—to source the insights they found through three weeks of prototype testing. 

When Intermountain published their updated version of the new provider scheduling experience, they A/B tested the new version against the old in the production environment. They found within a two-week test that the new version outperformed the old one with 39.6% higher completion rates. The Product team recognized this as a massive increase in performance, so they declared it the winner and pushed it out to all users. 

Tucker Christiansen says, “Ultimately, we had 87% year-over-year growth in all online scheduling. I’d estimate this major enhancement represents the biggest change driver. Other drivers would be minor enhancements and natural growth. We also found last year that online scheduling was our top source of five-star reviews. I like to call this the ‘wow factor.’ Most people giving a five-star rating don’t also leave a review, but they do when we’ve exceeded expectations.”