Redesigning the appointment

We’re currently working on redesigning how the appointment looks in the calendar. Specifically the form you see when creating or editing an appointment, and also the popup you get when clicking on an appointment.

We’re doing this for a few reasons:

• We are working on adding group bookings/classes to Cliniko and the current forms/display does not allow for it.
• Compatability with different devices is a priority for us; we want to make it better on phones, tablets and computers.
• Over time we have added more functionality to the appointments, but never did a full redesign. If we had all the information we have now when we originally designed the appointments, we would have done it differently.

The appointments are probably the hardest thing to redesign. Over 10,000,000 appointments have been created in Cliniko, with nearly 1,000,000 of them in the last month alone. This is the most used part of our software and is critical to everyone. It needs to be intuitive, fast and really easy to use.

This is still in progress, so I don’t have a final design to show you yet. What I want to share is some of the progress we’ve made so far.

These were some of our early attempts at redesigning the “New Appointment” form.

These really helped us to get the conversation started, and led to the following concepts.

From here we picked our favorites and iterated on them. Now we’re caring more about the details, but we’re really still looking for an overall concept we’re happy with before getting into the finer points. The next round of iterations were these.

From here we’ll start refining on our favorite one and see if we can get a solution that meets all the requirements.

We’re also redesigning the appointment popup that occurs when you click on an appointment. I won’t show the iterations here, but this is the direction we’re headed in.

We’re excited for these changes, not only because of the immediate improvement, but because it makes the appointment much more extendable and allows for future changes we have coming.

If you enjoy a bit of insight into what goes on behind the scenes, please let me know in the comments and we’ll share more.

Cliniko is amazing practice management software for healthcare businesses. Visit https://www.cliniko.com to see for yourself.