Clinic Queue

The clinics served mostly walk-in patients, and mornings meant a packed waiting room with no sense of how long anyone would wait. Receptionists handled crowd management, registration and phone calls all at once.

UX designer and researcher

Patients had no visibility into their place in line, so they stayed in the waiting room for hours rather than risk missing their turn. Many did not own smartphones, and some could not read the regional script, so an app-only solution would exclude the people who needed it most.

I ran contextual interviews with patients, receptionists and doctors across three clinics, then mapped the whole visit as a service blueprint. We prototyped with printed tokens and a volunteer sending manual SMS updates before building anything, which let us test the service rather than just the screens.

We kept a printed token as the primary artefact and added SMS as an optional layer that works on any phone. Updates were written in short, plain language and paired with a missed-call number that plays the current queue position aloud. For receptionists, a single tablet view replaced the paper register, with one large 'call next' action.

Across the pilot clinics, the waiting room was noticeably less crowded during peak hours, as patients who opted into SMS waited nearby rather than inside. Receptionists described the tablet view as the first tool that made their morning calmer rather than busier.

Prototyping the service with paper and a human stand-in revealed problems a digital prototype would have hidden, such as patients sharing a single phone across a family. I also learned to treat the receptionist as a primary user rather than an administrator.