📅 Appointment Booking Experience
Making a booking should be a simple, one-click task, but university students often navigate through multiple platforms and scattered information. As a UX/UI designer, I balanced user needs, business goals, and integration feasibility to deliver a streamlined booking experience.
📽️ Previously in myUni
About MyUni
The MyUni Portal aims to fill gaps in the student experience beyond academic management and external communication. One of its key goals is to lower the barriers for students to discover and access university resources effectively.
Current Experience Gap
Integrating various resources poses significant challenges at this stage. As a result, 95% of the options in the "Service & Support" section are presented as external links, which didn’t meet user’s need for streamlined access.
Previous Research Insights
Research feedback identified Appointment with Unit Coordinator, Student Centre, and CareerHub as the relatively in-demand and integration-ready services. Based on these findings, we initiated the redesign journey of the "Book an Appointment" experience.
The Process
Double Diamond - How do we design at USYD
Challenge
Uncovering the Gaps with Stakeholders
The appointment booking process on the website is highly fragmented, focusing primarily on helping users find available resources rather than enabling seamless booking.
Each type of appointment involves different vendors, resulting in inconsistent interaction logic and varying booking methods.
For certain services, such as faculty advising, the scope of the offering differs by faculty. Since each faculty operates independently, coordinating a standardized process is particularly challenging.
Based on feedback from business stakeholders, we need to increase the visibility and usage of specific services to align with recent policy changes.
Our User
Students who want to quickly resolve their concerns by having one-on-one conversations with someone capable of addressing their issues.
Current flow
Understanding Complexity to Inspire Change
To better understand the current experience, I mapped out each of the existing booking flows individually.
In reality, 80% of students begin with a Google search and may discover services through various paths, some of which include myUni. This case study focuses solely on flows that highlight interactions involving myUni.
Aware
Find
Exist in myUni
Book
Track
Manage
Feedback
Design Strategy
Usability Testing (for steps within myUni)
Voice of Customer (for all parts)
Usability Feedback
What can we do better in MyUni
Voice of Customer
What can we do for the end-to-end booking experience
When we look at the entire service booking journey, beyond just the interactions within myUni, and after interviewing six students, we found:
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Awareness, discoverability and search
Unintuitive naming, lengthy explanations, and prerequisites make it hard for students to find the right services when needed.
Email promotions are often ignored, while face-to-face communication, like Welcome Week presentations, proves more effective.
📋
Factors that impact booking experience
Timely availability is critical, especially for urgent needs.
Students prefer booking appointments that align with their class schedules and are located in familiar campus buildings.
For services like career or academic counseling, knowing the staff member's background and expertise is highly valued.
✅
Post appointment
Dissatisfaction often arises when the service cannot address their issue—either because their problem was outside the service's scope, they selected the wrong service, or they couldn't find the appropriate one. This again highlights gaps in the initial discovery process.
Respondents were most likely to provide feedback only when they were either extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with the service outcome.
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Motivators that lead to bookings
Final exam periods are peak times when many services are in high demand.
Proactive communication from some service providers, such as regular check-in emails, effectively motivates students to book appointments.
⏰
Tracking or managing appointment
Most students regularly check upcoming appointments, while a smaller group relies on reminders. But relying on manual calendar entry or setting reminders is inconvenient.
For rescheduling, students typically refer to email confirmations. However, when thinking about managing appointments directly within the platform like myUni, their first instinct is to use a built-in calendar feature.
Design Goal
A streamlined booking flow that allows users to easily find and quickly book the service they need for one-on-one support, without disrupting the service provider’s existing business flow.
Design opportunities
Drilling Down: HMW Help Users Connect to Useful Services?
The main challenge lies in connecting users with the services they need. To address this, we take a deeper look into how potential users of services might interact with different sections within the current MyUni framework.
The Redesign
Define the Scope
Through rapid prototyping and multiple discussions with stakeholders, we refined the User 'Goal and Task' Model and determined the final design solution along with development priorities.
MVP
🫴 Service & Support
Serves as the permanent hub for all service resources. Simplified and concise text enhances comprehension, while a clean interface and clear information hierarchy make it easier for users to locate the resources they need.
📄 Form
By comparing similar components across platforms, we established a unified form component library. This not only visually standardised the booking experience but also ensured consistency in the overall interaction patterns.
✨ One of the many details
The time picker design is thoughtfully crafted to accommodate various scenarios (e.g., allowing users to select specific appointment providers). When filling out the form, the system automatically defaults to the earliest time slot that best suits the user’s schedule, reducing decision-making effort.
📅 Calendar
Appointments booked will automatically create events in the calendar, allowing users to track or cancel directly from there.
The Future Blueprint
🏠 Home
Highlight ongoing or most relevant services for users, enhancing service discoverability while maintaining a focused interface.
🔍 Search
Bridge services to potential users, reducing the steps needed to access them.
🔔 Notification
Keep users informed and up-to-date while offering actionable shortcuts for a more seamless experience.
How I Deliver
From Concept to Execution: Ensuring Clarity and Collaboration
Based on the project requirements, I start by understanding the data structure and then create a detailed design. Throughout the process, I maintain clear communication with the team. In addition to design documentation, I deliver prototypes and walkthrough videos, ensuring that external stakeholders stay informed and aligned with the design.
Reviewing the API JSON data.
Annotating key details for developers.
Research Feedback
Proving the Design: A More Reliable and Intuitive Experience
To validate usability, we conducted click-through prototype testing with 5 students and MVP testing in a testing environment with 5 students. Participants were assigned specific tasks to complete.
Despite encountering some development bugs in the testing environment, all testers found the overall flow intuitive and were able to complete their tasks confidently. Compared to the previous version, they described the new experience as more reliable and convenient. Some prototype testers also expressed a preference for retaining email confirmations alongside platform notifications.
Impact
Bright Future Ahead
The new booking flow reduces the number of platforms required to complete a booking from a minimum of 4 to a maximum of 2.
More than 20 students will benefit from the improved booking flow every day once implemented.
The scalable design has attracted more service providers, who are now interested in integrating their services into the MyUni platform.
