Smart assistant application for dentists
UX design ▪ Case study ▪ Personal Project
How might we help dentists run their dental clinic conveniently?
UX designer
September 2022 – November 2022
Project background
Running a dental clinic is not just about taking care of your patients. It is a small business with the need for marketing, financial management, staff coordination, patient management system, etc. Lots of things need to be taken care of, while all you’ve signed up for was treating patients!
All a dentist wants is to focus on their practice and not to get caught up in the hassles of running a small business.
The current solution for running a dental clinic smoothly, is an all-in-one platform called CRM software. But using them is not all sunshine and rainbows:
The question is how can we help dentist run their clinic conveniently by enhancing the current solution?
While most dentists want to just care about treating their patients, they, however, have to deal with the fact that their practice is a business. Dentists need to keep various things in line including handling files, customer information, treatment booking, schedules, inventory, etc. This is a problem because at the end of the day, they are one person with limited time who is responsible for being aware of all aspects of their business and making all the important decisions, while treating patients.
The goal of this project is to enhance the current solution that dentists regularly use for this problem (CRM software) and tailor it to the their needs.
Research phase
At the beginning of 2023, American Dental Association (ADA) Health Policy Institute identified conducted a survey asking dentists about the biggest challenges facing practices.
I read the report published by them to get a better understanding of the challenges of running a dental clinic.
The report offers so many in-depth findings, but here is the most important shot of the report related to my research questions.
The common digital tool that is widely used in the dentistry business is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
I did a SWOT analysis on the top 5 CRM platforms that are mostly used.
I wrote down an script and sat down with 5 dentists to find about their struggles while running their clinic. What I asked:
❓ What are the main challenges of running a dental clinic?
❓ How do you currently solve these challenges?
❓ Are you using any digital tools to solve the challenges?
❓ How was your experience about using these tools?
“As a young dentist, it’s hard for me to keep track of everything. Of course that I have my office manager to help me, but it feels like I’m just going along with every decision without knowing what I’m doing.”
“Fast and clear communication has always been a problem. We should buy something and I forget to tell my office manager. A session gets canceled and I’m not aware of it until I arrive at the clinic. There are so many things to keep track of.”
Based on the initial findings of the user interviews, I designed a survey and post it on my class group chat. The questions of the survey were the same as the questions of the user interview to keep analysis of the findings cohesive.
I got 33 answers and I started to put my findings together.
Main pain points
5 of 5 interview participants and 90% of the survey respondents mentioned managing their patients as the most challenging part of running a dental clinic.
5 of 5 interview participants and 84.8% of the survey respondents talked about financial management of a dental clinic as a common challenge.
3 of 5 interview participants and 60% of the survey respondents mentioned managing the dental material inventory as a common challenge.
4 of 5 interview participants and 54.5% of the survey respondents talked about the problems of managing their staff and having a streamlined communication.
To get a deeper understanding of the user, I put my findings in an empathy map to help me design a user-centered solution.
Since the primary user segment of most dental CRMs is not dentists, I decided to create a user persona focused on the dentists.
defining, ideation & testing
As a dentist, I want to stay updated about all of the important information about my clinic and have access to them, so that I can make better informed decisions for my business.
These are some of the HMW questions to help the ideation process based on the POV statement:
After sketching some initial ideas and user flows, I created medium-facility mockups to do some usability tests.
I ideated 4 main features:
The daily schedule of the treatment sessions is the homepage of this app. It helps dentists to stay on top of their schedule changes like cancelations.
The analytics data about patients like the number new patients, cancelations, no shows. It also provides information about the age and gender distribution, complete list of patients, etc.
The financial data about net income, expenses, income, and their details. It also contains information about which age group brings the most income, etc.
To streamlining the communication between the staff and the dentists, I designed a ticketing system to keep the dentist informed about the internal affairs of the clinic.
After sketching some initial ideas and user flows, I created medium-fidelity mockups to do some usability tests.
I came up with these scenarios to do early usability testing with a range of users:
Most testers couldn’t describe the difference between database and analytics.
I changed the name “Database” to “Patients” to describe the analytics data of patients better.
Most testers couldn’t figure out how to find the list of patients. The clickable areas for finding the list weren’t clear.
I added a button at the end of the patient’s analytics for the “List of patients”.
After finishing the usability tests, I proceeded to design the high-fidelity mockups by starting with designing a style guide.
Here are some of the feedback from a range of dentists:
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