Overview
Client scheduler manages therapists' recurring availability and automatically schedules clients based on their role-specific performance goals. As Two Chairs tripled its client base in the span of 2 years, the legacy tool started to break down, contributing to long wait times for clients to seek care. My team and I rebuilt client scheduler from the ground up to scale the mission-critical tool as the company continues to expand.
My role
Led end-to-end design from discovery, research, concepting, design, testing, to implementation support.
Collaborators
Cross-functional partnership between Product, Design, Engineering, Data, Clinical leadership, People, and Operations.
Timeline
1 year
2024 launch
Impact
While we continue gathering data to assess the new client scheduler’s direct impact on total available client hours, it’s already clear that it has meaningfully improved clinicians’ day-to-day experience, allowing them to focus more of their time and energy on delivering quality care.
+30%
+31%
-31%
Let’s take a closer look
Problem
Two Chairs had long struggled to meet expected clinical capacity and fully utilize clinicians’ availability. The existing scheduling system was outdated, unintuitive, and overly complex—making it difficult to identify issues or understand the impact of potential changes. Many clinicians experienced burnout from spending excessive time troubleshooting their schedules, often over-requesting clients and still falling short of their scheduling goals.
Goal
Rebuild client scheduler to scale for the future, so we can maximize our clinical capacity, ensuring more clients receive care faster.
Approach
The client scheduler is a critical part of the business, directly tied to revenue generation. Because of its impact, we invested heavily in defining the problem space and aligning on a clear long-term vision.
Break down ambiguity
Discovery workshops
Stakeholder interviews
Clinical capacity is measured by "utilization rate"—a complex business metric that tracks the percentage of clinicians' working time spent with clients. It also serves as a clinician-facing performance measure. Most clinicians don’t fully understand how their actions contribute to the metric. To bridge this gap, we interviewed internal subject matter experts to gain a deep understanding of the factors influencing utilization, allowing us to identify more effective strategies for improvement.
Map the system
Service blueprint
User journeys
When facing a large and ambiguous problem space, one of my first steps is to map the high-level ecosystem—including key user roles and the surrounding systems. This helps ground the work in context and often reveals hidden workflows and pain points that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Leverage user research to prioritize opportunity areas
Usability testing
User Interviews
Focus groups
We conducted user research with high- and low-performing clinicians, as well as managers, to identify behavioral patterns and best practices affecting clinician utilization. By analyzing how clinician capacity flows through our service ecosystem, we mapped user insights along their journeys and developed a prioritized list of high-impact opportunity areas for improvement.
Key Insights
Make performance goals actionable
Utilization rate is a business metric that involves many factors beyond their control and it’s not fit as an actionable performance goal.
Reduce context switching
Constant toggling between tools, frequent system errors, and a lack of data transparency in the interface led to significant distrust in the system.
Optimize more availability for new clients
There were unnecessary hurdles in qualifying available time slots for new clients, such as allowing clients to start therapy every two weeks instead of weekly.
Make client preferred times visible
Clinicians didn’t have visibility into client demand and had trouble filling openings during unfavorable hours.
Co-create what success looks like
Vision workshop
Sketching
When tackling a large problem space, I always start the solution phase with a vision exercise involving the cross-functional team. This helps align our collective understanding of the key problems to solve for and what success looks like, fostering confidence and clarity as we move forward with the design work.
Finding direction by testing early
Wireframes
User testing
We began guerrilla testing with clinicians in the earliest stages of design, when concepts were still in low fidelity. With several major conceptual changes happening beyond the tool itself, early and frequent testing was essential to ensure alignment and usability.
Start with the most complex user role and scale
UX/UI design
Interaction design
Full-time clinicians working 40 hours a week faced the greatest challenges in managing their availability, balancing company and team responsibilities alongside client care. To address this, we focused our initial designs on their needs, then scaled the solution to support other clinical roles.
Brand alignment
Visual design
At the final stage of the project, the brand team introduced our new visual language and guidelines. I embraced our refreshed brand essence and integrated it into the Care Platform, enhancing the clinician experience with moments of delight and consistency across Two Chair products.
Solution
Driving system changes beyond design
Clear policies integrated into the product
The most significant breakthroughs in this project came from key policy changes that I strongly advocated for. Simplifying the client scheduling tool would not have been possible without these critical changes.
New performance metric - while 64% utilization remained our business goal, we broke down the metric to focus on what clinicians can control—reserving 28 recurring weekly hours for client sessions. The system would handle the rest.
Weekly therapy cadence - all new clients will start therapy on a weekly cadence. Clinicians can switch to biweekly sessions once a client is ready to transition out of therapy.
Unpopular times guidance - To balance supply and demand, we introduced a policy through the client scheduler that encourages clinicians to limit availability during unpopular times.
The app works hard so clinicians don’t have to
Actionable insights - As schedules shift, the system notifies clinicians if they have enough availability to meet their goals. Clinicians can see their one-off openings, potential conflicts, and available time for new clients, making it easier to manage their schedules.
Easy to manage single source of truth - Clinicians only need to update their long-standing weekly client hours, and the system automatically schedules new clients.
Intuitive editing experience - Clinicians can confidently edit their schedules with system guidance and without manager support.
Self-guided in-app onboarding - A streamlined onboarding flow enables new clinicians to become self-sufficient with minimal support from their managers. Consistent in-app guidance ensures that all clinicians receive the right recommendations for effectively managing their schedules.
Product Strategist
Researcher
Designer