123Dentist is a clinic finder for more than 450 dental practices across Canada, in English and French. Booking sent people out to an unbranded third-party scheduler, and that's where they stopped. This brought booking back inside the site and rebuilt the map and location structure underneath it.

Three different people use the same search: a parent choosing a family dentist, someone in pain who needs the nearest open clinic, and a dentist sizing up the network. All three hit the same booking button, and that button threw them out to a site that didn't look like 123Dentist and never reported back what happened.

Eight moderated sessions on prototypes, run before anything was built, produced four findings and three were acted on: service labels rewritten in the language people actually used, an accepting-new-patients filter added, and the booking handoff removed. The map and location structure was rebuilt around proximity, service, language spoken and opening hours, with geolocation as a pre-filter, alongside a clinic data model that had to account for which fields the client's existing systems could actually supply.

Removing the booking button was the uncomfortable recommendation. People tapped Book online, landed on the third-party scheduler and stopped trusting the site. The button came off for launch, leaving the phone number in its place. It came back in phase two, once booking happened inside the page. Removing it went directly against a stated objective to increase bookings, which is what made it worth arguing for.

No baseline existed on either side of the change, so there's no conversion figure to point to. What's measurable is the testing: eight sessions, four findings, three shipped.