Project 3

Where care begins: Reimagining "Find a Doctor"

Finding a doctor is a the first step in any patint's health care journey--yet it's often the most confusing and overwhelming part. This project was an opportunity to focus on streamlining those first touchpoints, remocing friction, and helping patients feel confident, supported, and connected to the right provider from the very start.

As part of our CMS migration effort from CommonSpot to Contentful, we completely redesigned our custom Find a Doctor tool on sharp.com. The new find a doctor tool includes a search tool powered by Algolia, and allows patients to book appointments right from each doctor's profile. Our new features included:

• A new search landing page
• A customizable and robust search tool with facets and sorting
• Search results and profile design
• Filters to find your perfect provider are visible throughout the journey
• Sort by distance and first available appointments
• All key information about the provider is available to the patient at the very top of the profile

Defining the problem

Re-designing our find a doctor experience meant so much more than a UI lift -- it required rehauling a complex ecosystem shape dby years to technical fragmentation and constraints. As we dug unto the problem space, several core challenges quickly surfaced

• A dated, unintuitive and limited interface that made the search experience feel overwhelming.
• Legacy technology with hard-to-maintain bugs and limitations that slowed updates and hindered long-term improvements.
• Multiple codebases powering different steps of th journey, leading to inconsistent interactions and visual patterns.
• Minimal filters and sorting options, making it difficult for patients to narrow in on the right provider.
• Provider profiles that varied widely in struture and quality, creating confusion and trust gaps.

A collaborative and data-driven process

To rebuild Find-a-Doctor in a way that truly served patients and scaled for the future, I followed a collaborative, evidence-driven process that aligned design, technology, and clinical needs:

Analyzed real user behavior by working closely with analytics partners to understand how patients searched, filtered, and navigated the legacy tool—helping us prioritize what mattered most.
Aligned across content, engineering, and clinical teams to validate medical requirements, clarify terminology, and ensure we were translating complex provider data into something patients could actually understand.
Designed the experience through a modular, system-first approach, creating flexible components that fit within our broader design system and reduced the long-term cost of maintenance.
Completed usability testing of multiple flows, insuring patient feedback was applied into our final designs.
Structured the build using blended CMS–code templates, giving developers stability in core logic while empowering our content team to update key information without deployment cycles.
Ran thorough QA and content mapping checks to confirm that data migrated cleanly, components behaved consistently, and the interface performed smoothly across browsers and devices.
Conducted multiple rounds of usability testing, iterating on search flows, filter patterns, and profile layouts to make the experience clearer, faster, and more intuitive for patients.

Outcomes

In the first quarter post-launch:
• Achieved 25% increase in appointments booked through doctor profiles
• Reduced bounce rate by 26%, indicating improved relevance and usability
• Drove a 20% lift in total profile views, supporting better discoverability
• 63% of users engaged with our new filters in their search
• Boosted mobile conversation by 18%, reflecting enhanced responsiveness and accessibility

Find a doctor tool

Where care begins: Reimagining "Find a Doctor"

Defining the problem

A collaborative and data-driven process

Outcomes

Final designs for MVP

Next project:

Design system