Acubook: a booking platform for UK acupuncture clinics.

My client Kim wanted a simple way for patients to compare UK acupuncture clinics by price, insurance, and availability, all in one place. This is what I built for her.

The ask

Kim approached me for this project because I'm a licensed doctor of Korean medicine. She's Korean, has lived in the UK a long time, and is personally interested in acupuncture and East Asian medicine clinics there. It's her own side project. There was no standard way for patients to compare UK acupuncture clinics, treatments, and pricing in one place, including insurance coverage. She asked me to build that.

This video, recorded from the real Figma prototype, shows the whole booking pathway, from search to confirmation.

How you book in Acubook, the full booking pathway, from search to confirmation.

What I built

I designed and built the booking system: a clinic search and filter view, an insurance-provider filter with per-treatment coverage indicators, and the booking flow itself, from calendar and time selection through to confirmation. I also built the sample screens covering the whole site, marketing pages, clinic search, booking flow, that Kim used to pitch this idea forward as her own business.

Design decisions

1. One page, not a step-by-step wizard.

Kim wanted everything visible on one page: price, location, and clinic details together, with minimal clicking around. I first designed this as a step-by-step flow, symptoms, then location, then results, closer to how a mobile app would handle it. She cut it. Too many steps just to reach an appointment. We were designing desktop-first, so there was no real reason to split it into separate screens. One page could hold the search, filters, and results together instead. That's what shipped.

2. Honest pricing over false precision.

She also wanted the insurance filter to show which clinics accepted which insurers, BUPA, AXA, Vitality, and others. Before finalizing the design, I checked how private health cover for acupuncture actually works in the UK. Coverage varies a lot by insurer: some require a GP referral, some exclude chronic conditions, and session caps differ across providers.

That's why the filter shows two honest states per treatment instead of one price: covered with direct billing, or self-pay only. The same treatment can cost a different amount for each patient, depending on their specific plan. A single fixed price would be wrong for a lot of people, so the price shows as "from £X" instead, with the real amount confirmed once the clinic checks the patient's plan.

3. Clinic first, specialist chosen inside.

One more decision from early on: we considered letting patients search by individual acupuncturist as its own top-level mode, separate from searching by clinic.

A UK national survey found most people who see an acupuncturist come in for chronic pain and musculoskeletal issues, back, neck, shoulder, and knee pain, headaches, and general wellbeing, not urgent or serious conditions. From my own background as a doctor, these patients don't need to be matched to one specific specialist the way someone with a serious diagnosis would.

So we treated Acubook more like a wellness-booking platform, closer to Treatwell, than a doctor-matching one. That's why clinic comes first: patients pick a clinic, then choose a specialist inside it.

4. Designing for medical credibility.

Kim wanted to build awareness of acupuncture's medical effectiveness, and trust with people who aren't used to it yet. In the UK, that effectiveness, for muscle pain and other conditions, isn't widely known. So I designed Acubook like a medical platform: blue and purple gradients, colors that read as professional and medical.

This is the part of client work I think matters most. Building what the client asked for is the easy part. The harder part is checking the real-world constraints and actual user behavior behind that request, before shipping the design, that's what actually makes it work once real people use it.

Reflection

Acubook hasn't shipped. It's still Kim's own side project. What's here is the complete design work I delivered for her.

Researching how differently the medical market treats acupuncture from country to country was genuinely interesting to me.

I trained and practiced as a doctor of Korean medicine in Korea, where acupuncture is delivered by licensed doctors. In the UK, it sits under a different system entirely, credentialed through bodies like the British Acupuncture Council rather than medical school, and often grouped with spa and beauty services.

My medical background gave me two things I used directly on this project.

One is reading patient patterns. Most acupuncture patients come in with mild, manageable conditions, that's what shaped the clinic-first, wellness-style booking flow over a symptom-triage one.

The other is picking up a specific culture's medical regulations fast. I read the real UK insurance rules quickly because I already think in clinical terms, which is what made the insurance-coverage feature possible.

That difference between countries is what made this project interesting to me, and useful.