Project Overview
Role: Product Designer / UX Strategist
Timeline: 4 Months
Industry: SaaS · Appointment Scheduling · Business Management
Focus: UX Research · Product Strategy · Information Architecture · User Flows · UI Design · Interaction Design
Executive Summary
Appointment-based businesses have to coordinate several moving parts at once. They need to manage availability, staff, services, customer information, payments, cancellations, reminders, and day-to-day schedules while also providing customers with a booking experience that feels effortless. SimplyBook.me already addresses many of these needs through a highly configurable platform. However, the breadth of functionality creates another problem: the more capabilities a product offers, the harder it can become to make the experience feel simple. My approach focused on reorganizing the experience around the most important jobs users need to accomplish, reducing unnecessary cognitive load, and creating clearer pathways between booking, scheduling, client management, and business operations. The objective was to create an experience where businesses can manage their operations confidently while customers can book appointments with minimal friction.
Web
Mobile
The Challenge
“I want to get my business ready for bookings, but I shouldn't have to understand the entire system before I can get started.”
SimplyBook.me offers a powerful collection of tools for appointment-based businesses, but its extensive functionality creates a significant UX challenge. Businesses may need to configure services, assign staff, define availability, manage multiple locations, synchronize calendars, accept payments, collect customer information, send reminders, and analyze booking activity. For a first-time business owner, this can make the product feel like there is a lot to understand before they can simply start accepting bookings.
Project Constraints
One of the biggest constraints was the breadth of the platform. SimplyBook.me supports a wide range of business models and provides extensive customization, from service providers and schedules to payment options, client information, memberships, classes, marketing tools, and integrations. The redesign could not simply remove features because different businesses depend on different capabilities. Another constraint was the existence of two interconnected experiences: the business/admin experience and the customer booking experience. Improvements to one could affect the other. The product also needed to support different levels of technical confidence. A small salon owner, healthcare provider, fitness instructor, and larger organization may all use the same platform but have very different workflows. The solution therefore needed to prioritize simplicity without sacrificing flexibility.
Research & Discovery
Competitive Analysis
I benchmarked SimplyBook.me against other appointment and scheduling products, including Calendly, Fresha, Acuity Scheduling, Setmore, Square Appointments, and Booksy. The analysis focused on onboarding, appointment creation, calendar management, service configuration, customer booking, payment flows, reminders, staff management, and overall information architecture. Calendly provided a useful benchmark for simplicity. Its strength is the direct relationship between availability and booking, with relatively little configuration required before a user can share a scheduling link. Fresha provided insight into the broader service-business ecosystem, particularly around salons, beauty businesses, staff management, appointments, and payments. Acuity Scheduling was useful for examining customization and more complex scheduling requirements. Setmore provided another reference for small-business scheduling, particularly around appointment management, staff calendars, and customer booking. Square Appointments demonstrated how scheduling can be integrated with payments and broader business operations. Booksy offered a useful reference for marketplace-style service discovery and appointment booking, particularly for beauty and wellness businesses. The competitive analysis revealed a clear opportunity for SimplyBook.me: Keep the depth, but make the path to value much shorter. Rather than forcing users to understand every available feature during setup, the experience could progressively introduce functionality based on the user's business type, goals, and stage of setup.
Product Strategy
Make setup simple. Make complexity optional. Instead of presenting the platform as a large collection of tools, I structured the experience around the core jobs users need to accomplish. The product journey became: Set Up → Configure → Publish → Book → Manage → Grow During setup, users establish the essentials of their business. They then configure services and availability before publishing their booking experience. Once customers begin booking, the platform shifts its emphasis toward managing appointments, clients, staff, and payments. As the business grows, advanced capabilities such as analytics, marketing, memberships, promotions, and integrations become more relevant. This approach allows the product to grow with the user instead of asking users to understand everything from day one.
Information Architecture
The information architecture was reorganized around the user's mental model rather than the platform's feature inventory. The primary navigation could be structured around: Dashboard A high-level overview of today's bookings, upcoming appointments, revenue, and important actions. Calendar A centralized view of appointments, availability, staff schedules, and booking conflicts. Bookings Management of upcoming, completed, cancelled, and rescheduled appointments. Clients Customer profiles, booking history, notes, and relevant information. Services Management of services, pricing, duration, availability, and providers. Business Locations, staff, working hours, booking settings, and business configuration. Growth Analytics, promotions, reviews, memberships, marketing, and other growth tools. This structure reduces the feeling of navigating a feature-heavy administration system and instead organizes the product around the business owner's daily workflow.
Design Process
User Flow
The customer booking flow was designed around reducing unnecessary decisions. The ideal journey becomes: Choose Service → Choose Provider → Choose Time → Enter Details → Confirm → Receive Reminder The business-side journey follows a similar principle: Create Business → Add Service → Set Availability → Connect Staff → Publish Booking Page → Manage Appointments This creates a clear relationship between setup and usage.
Key Decisions
One of the biggest decisions was to reduce the amount of information presented simultaneously. Instead of exposing every available configuration option immediately, the experience introduces advanced functionality progressively. The dashboard was also treated as a decision-making surface rather than simply a collection of statistics. Important actions such as today's appointments, upcoming bookings, schedule conflicts, and outstanding tasks should be immediately visible. Another important decision was separating daily operations from business configuration. A business owner checking today's calendar should not have to navigate through the same interface used to configure their business months earlier. The booking experience was similarly simplified by making the service, provider, availability, and confirmation stages visually distinct.
Outcome & Impact
The redesign created a clearer product structure that prioritizes the actions users perform most frequently while allowing advanced functionality to remain accessible. The biggest intended impact was reducing the cognitive burden associated with managing a feature-rich scheduling platform. For businesses, this means a shorter path from account creation to accepting their first booking, clearer daily scheduling, and easier access to client and appointment information. For customers, the goal is a booking journey that feels fast, predictable, and trustworthy. For the final portfolio version, I would add verified metrics here if you have them, such as onboarding completion, booking completion rate, time to first booking, reduction in setup time, or usability-test scores.
Experience
My Contributions
My contribution focused on product design and UX strategy across the core scheduling experience. This included user research, competitive analysis, information architecture, user-flow mapping, wireframing, interaction design, high-fidelity UI design, responsive design, and design-system development. I also approached the project from a product-management perspective by considering prioritization, user needs, business objectives, feature discoverability, and the relationship between the customer and business experiences.
Final Reflection
Working on the SimplyBook.me experience strengthened my understanding of designing complex SaaS products where multiple user types, workflows, and business requirements intersect. The project challenged me to think beyond individual screens and consider the relationship between onboarding, configuration, scheduling, customer booking, payments, client management, and business growth. The central lesson was simple: A powerful product should not make users feel powerful because they understand every feature. It should make them feel powerful because they can accomplish what they need without thinking about everything happening underneath.
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