Video chat appointments
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Collaborators
1 Product Owner, 1 Business Analyst, Engineering, Customer Success Team
Timeline
Duration: ~6 months
Status: Shipped Q2 2022
Overview
Growing telehealth usage increased demands on care teams
Video Chat is Updox's telehealth platform for scheduling, managing, and hosting virtual appointments. As telehealth adoption grew during COVID-19, care teams increasingly relied on it to coordinate visits, placing greater demands on existing workflows.
I led improvements across scheduling, participant management, and patient readiness to better support these evolving needs and help strengthen Video Chat's value to customers.
the problem
Video Chat needed to better support complex visits
The initial opportunity was to support multiple participants within a virtual visit. The existing 1:1 experience limited care teams’ ability to bring caregivers, family members, or interpreters into appointments.
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Previous experience – Appointments limited to 1 patient participant
tHE HYPOTHESIS
Better support for complex visits could help reduce churn
We believed that better supporting multi-participant workflows could reduce missed appointments and help prevent customers from switching to competing Telehealth platforms.
The initial focus was on enabling more flexible participation during appointments. As the project progressed, we explored how other workflow improvements could make Video Chat more useful to care teams and better support their evolving needs.
impact
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+32,000
Daily appointments
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+15
Components adopted system-wide
research
Four workflow challenges surfaced across Video Chat
To understand where care teams experienced the most friction, I analyzed 30 reviews, 2,000 survey responses, and observed two care team sessions. Research identified four recurring workflow challenges:
- Participant limitations: 1:1 appointments and camera requirements limited coordination and participant access.
- Patient readiness: Care teams couldn't tell when patients were ready, resulting in idle time between appointments.
- Connectivity: Technical issues were difficult to identify, leading to missed appointments and support requests.
- Scheduling: Sequential scheduling didn't scale with appointment volume.
exploration & key decisions
Designing for real-world workflows
Session flexibility
I explored three layouts for supporting group and audio-only appointments: pinned participants, grid view, and dominant speaker with collapsible participants.
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Option 1: Pinned to right; Option 2: Grid view; Option 3: Dominant speaker w/collapsible participants
While pinned participants minimized engineering effort, it didn't scale well for larger sessions. After reviewing trade-offs with Product and Engineering, I recommended a hybrid layout that allowed care teams to switch views during appointments.
Proposed design – Gallery and speaker layout controls
Managing participants mid-appointment
As appointments expanded beyond 1:1, care teams needed to add participants throughout a session. To support scenarios like inviting caregivers, family members, or interpreters, I extended the existing side panel with participant search and invite actions.
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Proposed design – Adding a participant mid-appointment
Prioritizing patient management
Previously, the waiting room combined patient management with device setup and previews, making it harder for care teams to focus on upcoming appointments.
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Previous design – Video preview & audio controls visible in waiting room
I refocused the waiting room on patient management by moving video previews and audio controls into a 'My Device' menu, keeping device checks accessible without competing for attention.
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Proposed design – 'My Device' dropdown for pre-appointment video preview and audio controls
Supporting high-volume scheduling
Care teams routinely scheduled multiple appointments, but could only send invites one at a time. I introduced batch invites, table actions for editing and removing, and clearer patient status visibility.
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Top: New invite dropdown; Bottom: Notification to provide visibility of patient status and 'More Actions' menu added
Strengthening the design system
I introduced system-level components and design token enhancements adopted across Updox’s product suite, shipping 15+ new components and standardizing 150+ tokens to improve accessibility and enable faster implementation.
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outcomes
Measuring impact
- Daily usaged Increased from 15,000 to 47,000 appointments
- No-show appointments decreased by 3%
- User retention improved
The updates to Video Chat are so valuable, simplifying and unifying the Telehealth experience for patients and providers… – Updox Co-Founder
Post-release learnings
Usage patterns showed that layout preferences varied by appointment type. Teams running 1:1 appointments favored the grid view, while multi-participant sessions preferred the dominant speaker layout.
This insight led to a system-level enhancement that allowed teams to set a default video layout in Settings.
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