CityDoc is a group of private medical practices offering vaccinations for travel and COVID-19, as well as a variety of health screening services. Based out of 10 of specialist standalone clinics as well as a national network of in-pharmacy services, CityDoc administers around 100,000 vaccines a year.
To support their rapid growth, Wild Dog was approached to design and build a new website. From a design point of view, the website needed to be far more professional and contemporary, as well as convey the breadth of services offered, so CityDoc could compete with the range of both Travel and Health Vaccine services as well as position themselves as having a justified premium on high street equivalents, by highlighting the medical expertise of their staff and its heritage.
Approach
Information Architecture was a critical stage of the process, with a variety of user journeys needing to be catered for. Users may not know which vaccines they need for travel; they may just know where they are travelling. Users are mostly first time visitors, mostly coming from a cluttered search environment, and the site needed to quickly reassure them, give them an understanding of the services and offering, and feed them into the booking journey
The new booking journey accounted for all the required factors – travel destination, type of travel, vaccines required, also the users’ motivation for booking, such as whether convenience was driven by location or time. Users needed to be aware of the variety of services, but the site needed to clearly distinguish between services, such as not overlapping sexualth health with travel.
Less than 50% of traffic comes from desktops and laptops, so the complex booking journey needed to be seamless and convenient on mobile devices.
Branding had to be sensitive to the different role CityDoc plays for its audience – both as facilitator for inspirational travel, as well as considered, professional medical advice. It also needed to incorporate established branded clinics who were coming under the CityDoc umbrella.
Technical
The site build involved restructuring the database and creating a totally bespoke WordPress installation to break the site’s content down into manageable and maintainable chunks. Key areas that the content has been broken down into include the clinics, destinations, products (in the clinic and at home), news articles and standalone pages.
To improve performance we reduced the number of plugins for 62 plugins to 26. Meanwhile, we implemented 2-factor authentication and hidden login URL for access to the admin dashboard for editing as an additional security feature.
Search was the main battleground for CityDoc vs its competitors, so we significantly improved the format of the HTML document rendered in the browser, increasing the SEO compatibility for the site in the future.
The build also included an array of API integrations, including a fulfilment provider (Huboo), customer support service provider (Zendesk), ecommerce partner (WooCommerce) and also CityDoc’s two medical diary management systems (PPS and xMedicus).
The booking journey itself was entirely custom built, that can be triggered from multiple areas of the site, pre-populating based on the page the user has come from to save time entering information. The Front End was entirely built in Vue, as a fast and lightweight technology, giving a clean code interface for future development and employing deferred code loading to speed up the site.
Along the journey, after a customer has selected a clinic and a service they would like to book, a request is made to a dynamic endpoint for availability. As the in-house diary management system each clinic uses, varies, this endpoint is populated via an API connection to the relevant company for the data. This process happens in seconds and returns to the customer, available slots to book, which mirrors the availability of the pharmacist’s diary.
The end of the booking journey is integrated with the standalone-product checkout functionality of WooCommerce and enables the customer to make a secure payment to reserve their appointment. CityDoc uses Stripe as their chosen payment gateway, and additional work was done to ensure extra data about the purchase is passed through into the Stripe dashboard for the CityDoc product sales team to reference.
After payment is complete, the appointments are confirmed in the diary management systems and this triggers notifications to be sent to the customer to confirm their appointment.
All in all, this is a technically capable appointment booking system with a variety of superb features to demonstrate the breadth of CityDoc’s online offering.
