Reduced the scheduling form’s abandonment rate by 13% by cutting the number of steps, adding new features, and refreshing the interface’s visual design.
13 %
13 %Fewer users abandoned the form before completing the booking.
14%
Fewer users made mistakes while filling out the form.
-12s
On average, users book the service faster.
The problem at a glance
27% of customers dropped off before completing Roto-Rooter’s online scheduling form.
The flow hadn’t been updated in years and overlooked several UX best practices.
Flow walkthrough
Final approved design
The process in the project
-
Define success metrics
- Defining the main KPIs
- Aligning with business goals
- Establishing criteria to compare versions
-
Critical visual changes
- Analyzing the current experience
- Identifying conceptual and visual problems
- Prioritizing the most critical problems
-
Explore design directions
- Researching and analyzing references
- Exploring different approaches
- Defining the initial concept
-
Leadership validation
- Presenting the proposal
- Deciding on the visual concept together with the client
- Collecting and incorporating feedback
-
Modernization and new features
- Reviewing the existing components
- Creating new components and variations
- Applying the patterns to the flow
-
Usability testing
- Making sure the new features performed well
- Making sure the old problems were solved
- Qualitatively assessing visual preference
-
Measure and compare
- Comparing versions
- Analyzing the data
- Identifying the best-performing version
Critical visual changes
Each change here solves a specific problem, grounded in usability heuristics and accessibility best practices.
Contrast and color use
Modernization and new features
New components and tweaks designed to make the flow faster and more modern.
Informative banner
Usability testing
To validate the decisions before locking the final version, I tested the prototypes with 7 people from different age groups, aiming to represent the real audience booking a plumbing service, from people already comfortable with technology to those who aren’t.
-
Progress indicator
- Designed three progress variations (stepper, spinner and tag) and tested them on mobile and desktop.
- The spinner did well on mobile but performed poorly on desktop.
- Went with the stepper for its consistent performance across both.
-
Field ordering
- Asked whether the field grouping made sense and whether anything felt missing when requesting the service.
- Feedback was consistent: the fields asked for were the ones needed, with no gaps noticed.
-
Navigation flow
- Mapped scenarios for moving forward, going back and handling errors while filling out the form.
- Checked whether the flow felt intuitive from start to finish.
-
Visual perception
- A more qualitative question: did the new layout feel more modern and visually pleasant than the previous version?
- I wanted to understand their perception on the tool compared to the brand.
Learnings
What I learned
- Not every decision is settled by technical logic, part of the job is negotiating well when a recommendation gets rejected.
- I learned to tell apart what compromises usability from what’s just client preference, and to yield professionally when that’s the right call.
What I would do in the future
- I’d look for access to more analytics data to identify problems more independently.
- I’d A/B test the hypotheses that didn’t make it in, like reordering fields, to validate impact with data instead of argument.
- I’d expand usability testing to more participants.