2022-2025 / SaaS / Health / Web - Tablet
Improving the inbox for staff who run more than one practice
1 in 3
messages automatically routed
~5 Min
New rule setup
Led discovery with practice admins, ran three rounds of routing concepts through a pilot, and owned UX direction for the automation builder. Worked closely with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success throughout.
Key stakeholders worked with
Director of Product
Product Manager & Engineering Manager
Head of Sales
Head of Customer Success
Key partners' Practice Admins & CTOs
The challenge
Klara is a communication platform for healthcare practices. At its centre is a shared inbox, where every patient message lands and front-desk staff work through it together.
Some staff look after one practice. Others cover ten or more. As the platform grew, message volume outpaced what the inbox was built for, and staff covering several locations carried most of the load.
The task was to make the inbox hold up at scale for multi-practice staff, without slowing down anyone still running just one. Before designing anything, we needed to understand where their time was going.
Every message gets read by someone.
Practice admins own the setup and the outcome.
Self-serve, with little or no onboarding.
Two designers, 50+ engineers, six teams. Each of us worked with two teams day-to-day and supported the backend-heavy teams as needed.
Customers weren't used to setting up Klara features themselves.
Customer access was limited by sales and CS, time zones, and how busy practices were.
Discovery & ideation
Road to our solution
If routine messages were routed automatically, staff would only need to step in where "routine" broke down. That would cut the repeated sorting for multi-location teams without putting judgement calls in the wrong hands.
STEP
1
Messages are tagged when a patient starts a conversation. The tag persists for that session, but staff can reassign it if needed.
STEP
2
Each rule triggers one of two actions: route the message to the right inbox, or send an auto-reply. Simple by design — the fewer the choices, the faster the setup.
STEP
3
For multi-site practices, rules can apply across all locations or selected ones — so any efficiency saving scales without repeating the setup office by office.
Once the rule is created the staff members are taken to the Message Automation view showing an overview of the active rules categorised by message subject with a simple chip based, sentence structure.
Existing automations are edited or deleted by clicking the row and opening the completed rule.
Discarded ideas
Many iterations of our UI were tried but for reasons of feasibility or fit were discarded or put into an idea backlog
An early version of the builder split the steps across multiple screens to provide simple, concise stages for users. But after some user testing, we found that what we gained in focus per step, we lost by not giving a single overview of the selections being made, which necessitated an overview page so users could check their configuration.
I also experimented with sentence-based naming for rules and using colour-coded pills as ways to make the titles instantly intuitive and scannable. But both added visual clutter when automation rules built up, so we opted for simple brand blue pills.
Outcomes
Learning
We spent too long debating the logic between versions before we had evidence to settle it. Getting a simple MLP into the pilot broke the deadlock.
Next time I'd ship smaller and sooner, and accept some throwaway work along the way.
