Service Design — 2024
Alto Scheduling
A booking system that six practices had all learned to work around in six different ways.
Double-booking incidents fell to near zero across six practices.
- Client
- Alto Veterinary Group
- Discipline
- Scheduling and staff-facing UX
- Engagement
- 11 weeks, Sep to Nov 2024
- Team
- Two engineers, operations director, three practice managers
Overview
Alto runs six veterinary practices sharing one appointment system. Every practice had built its own workaround: colour-coded paper diaries, a private spreadsheet, one reception desk running a wall planner in parallel.
Those workarounds were the research. Each one marked a place where the software had failed to describe how the work actually happens.
Role
Service and product designer, contract
11 weeks, Sep to Nov 2024 · Two engineers, operations director, three practice managers
- Site visits and observation at four of the six practices
- Service blueprint covering booking, arrival, consultation and follow-up
- Scheduling interface redesign for reception and clinical staff
- Appointment type, duration and resource conflict model
- Staff training material and rollout sequencing
Problem
The system modelled an appointment as a person and a time. The reality needed four things at once: a clinician, a room, sometimes a specific piece of equipment, and a duration that varied wildly by appointment type. A twenty-minute vaccination and a ninety-minute surgical consult were the same object in the database.
So reception staff booked defensively. They padded gaps, blocked slots that were technically free, and kept a parallel record they actually trusted. Utilisation looked poor and double-bookings still happened, because the safeguards lived in people's heads rather than in the software.
Process
Observing four reception desks
Two days each at four practices, watching bookings taken by phone and at the counter. Every workaround got photographed and traced back to the specific software assumption that caused it.
Blueprinting the whole service
The blueprint covered front stage and back stage from the first phone call to the follow-up. It showed that most scheduling pain originated in a decision made much earlier, when the appointment type was chosen.
Modelling resources honestly
An appointment became clinician plus room plus optional equipment plus a type-driven duration. Conflicts are surfaced at the moment of booking, in plain language, with the specific clash named rather than a generic unavailable.
Designing for a phone in one hand
Reception staff book while on a call, often mid-sentence. The interface supports keyboard-only booking end to end, and the most common appointment types are reachable in a single keystroke.
Rolling out one practice at a time
We started with the practice that had the most elaborate paper workaround, on the theory that if it worked there it would work anywhere. Its practice manager then ran the training for the other five, which mattered more than any documentation I could have written.
Outcomes
- ~0
- Double-booking incidents, from 12 to 18 a month
- +18%
- Consulting room utilisation
- 6 → 0
- Practices maintaining a parallel paper diary
- −44%
- Time to book a complex appointment
The paper diaries going away is the outcome I trust most. Staff abandon a workaround only when the real system has genuinely earned it.
Gallery
Tools
- Figma
- FigJam
- Miro
- Optimal Workshop
