Carely
Designing a healthcare appointment experience from the ground up
Prototyping · Design system · UX/UI · Content Design
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Role
Product Designer
Role: Product Designer
Timeline: 12 months
Scope: Design system, Research, Content Design
Project overview
Carely is a healthcare appointment app I designed from the ground up, covering the full journey from finding a healthcare professional and booking an appointment to managing, cancelling, and rescheduling care.
While designing the broader product experience, I chose to focus on cancellation as a critical moment in the patient journey. When a healthcare professional cancels an appointment, users need to understand what happened, find another available option, and know what happens to payment, insurance, or refunds.
This became the journey I explored in greater depth: how could Carely help patients recover from a cancellation and continue their care without having to start the process over?
Scope
Design system, Research, Content Design
Timeline
12 months
Competitive research
Before defining Carely’s appointment experience, I reviewed Brazilian and US healthcare products to understand how they handle availability, payment or insurance, appointment status, cancellation, and rescheduling.
I compared Zocdoc, Teladoc, NAV, and Hapvida/NotreDame to identify recurring patterns and gaps that could inform the product.
The benchmark showed that cancellation and rescheduling are often treated as separate actions. I reframed the problem around recovery: helping patients understand what changed and continue their care with as little repetition as possible.
Defining the opportunity“How might we help patients recover from a cancelled appointment without having to start over?”
Rescheduling couldn’t be designed in isolationDesigning a better rescheduling experience required decisions across the entire appointment journey. I first needed to define how patients find care, choose a professional, select a date and time, confirm an appointment, manage its status, and recover when plans change.
Appointment lifecycle
Booking Management Recovery
Find care Manage appointment
Choose a professional
Select date & time
Confirm appointment
Appointment cancelled
Reschedule
New confirmation
Mapping the recovery flowI mapped the end-to-end recovery flow to understand how cancellation, rescheduling, payment, confirmation, and next actions needed to connect.
Turning recovery into a complete appointment flow
Designing the recovery journey also required defining the interactions that happen before and after cancellation. I designed the core appointment flow around four decisions that keep context, availability and next actions visible throughout the experience.
Availability and provider selectionInstead of asking patients to choose a professional before knowing their availability, I surfaced available dates and times together with provider options to support faster decision-making.
Design decision: Availability is part of the choice, not a step that comes after it.
Keeping payment in contextPayment remained connected to the appointment being created, so patients could review the professional, consultation type, date, time and cost before choosing how to pay.
Design decision: Keep financial information connected to the appointment context.
Confirmation creates a clear next state
Confirmation was designed as more than a success message. It gives patients a clear record of what was booked and a direct path to manage the appointment afterward.
Design decision: Every completed action should make the next state explicit.
Cancellation leads directly to recoveryWhen an appointment is cancelled, Carely keeps the user inside the care journey. Instead of ending with a notification or requiring patients to start another search, the interface surfaces rescheduling as the primary next action.
Design decision: Treat cancellation as a transition, not an endpoint.
Turning recovery into a complete appointment flowIndividual decisions were then connected into one end-to-end experience covering booking, payment, appointment management, cancellation and rescheduling.
The end-to-end experience
What I learnedDesigning the full appointment journey showed me that recovery experiences cannot be treated as isolated edge cases. Cancellation affects availability, payment, communication, and the patient’s ability to continue care.
The project also reinforced the importance of designing content, interaction, and system behavior together — especially in moments where users need to understand what changed and what they can do next.