Thérapie Clinic is Europe’s largest aesthetic clinic. It has over 70 clinics across Ireland, The UK and New York. Our team was hired into a new tech org within the business during 2021. The objective of our work at Thérapie Clinic was to replace a collection of third-party platforms with in-house software. One team designed and built internal tools for use within clinics and the call centre. Another team was working on reporting and data. Ours was to create a new e-commerce system.
The existing e-commerce solution was split across two separate domains. Most clients landed on a WordPress site which displayed clinic & treatment information, pricing, FAQ’s etc. When users clicked on a call to action for booking or purchasing they moved to a third-party system called Nua. Nua allowed users to register accounts, book or cancel appointments and purchase both treatments and products. Nua was also available as an IOS/Android app for regular clients.
I was the first person to join the team, followed closely afterwards by a product manager and a lead engineer. We spent our first few months hiring engineers and going through an exhaustive discovery process to develop a deep knowledge of the business, the technical domain and what clients felt was missing in their current Thérapie experience.
We accomplished this through a variety of research techniques including:
At this point it was clear that we would not be able to replace elements of the experience incrementally. We would need to replicate the entirety of Nua as our MVP without losing any of the functionality it covered. This would mean over a year of work without a release, by necessity. We needed to reduce risk and we did so by regularly testing wireframes of increasing fidelity with users, including interactive prototypes built in Figma and isolated flows in a staging environment as soon as we could. Usertesting.com enabled me to do this at scale. Identifying bugs and design issues quickly among users internationally and on different devices. I was also able to use the scale of the business to run large internal tests with a variety of staff members and stakeholders . This was somewhat useful for design feedback (though nowhere near as useful as what we were doing with actual users) but especially valuable for trust and buy-in.
The next step was to look at our personas and define what they would want out of the app in greater detail. Once this was discussed with the client, I wrote up user flows and workshopped them with the client and our dev team. As a result we were able to work out how processes like the random matchmaking system would work on paper at the very start of the project. Afterwards these userflows were translated into a sitemap, then wireframed into an early prototype that was tested with the client. At the same time I brought an illustrator onto the project to help with the graphics and art direction. We put together a series of moodboards and early designs to define the visual style of the game.
All of the above enabled us to launch with a degree of confidence and despite some technical hiccoughs that are almost impossible to avoid with a release of this scale the launch went well. Assessing performance was difficult, as business performance is largely seasonal and the climate has changed dramatically from early 2022 to 2023. On top of that we have to account for several business changes in the meantime (On release our Free Consultation flow now requires users to submit their card details to secure a booking). I sat down with our data analytics team to prepare custom dashboards for us and stakeholders in Looker that take this into account. Overall the impact of the release was broadly positive: In Ireland our e-commerce conversion rate increased from 2.52% to 2.87%, but in the UK it increased from 1.48% to 3.90%
You can visit Thérapie's site below. If you want to get a full taste of the experience I'd recommend booking a free consultation (make sure it's more than 48 hours away, otherwise you won't be able to cancel it). You can also find the app version of Dash in the Android and IOS stores.
