Soap Dental

Soap Dental is a new dental office that recently opened this spring in the suburbs of Boston by Dr. Bob Cheng, DMD. They are a family-oriented and patient centric office offering general dental, family dental, and cosmetic services. Being a brand-new business, their online presence is currently limited. Soap Dental is looking for a responsive website to stay competitive in the Boston market and provide customers with a positive enjoyable experience.

How might we help Soap Dental stay competitive in the Boston market.

The Solution

Understanding the Dental Market Landscape & Users

Research

Research allows me to first understand what I know, what I don’t know, and what I need to find out. It also enables me to better understand the market trend and dive deep into our understanding of our users, not just their immediate frustrations, but their views, behaviors, fears, limitations, reasoning, and goals as well.

Before diving into my research, I first want to clearly define my goals, objects, and methods in executing my research by outlining a structured guide to my approach. This allowed me to identify any assumptions I may have to validate and focus on the goals that I need to achieve.

Research Goals

• Identify Soap Dentals target audience

• Gain a better understanding of the dental industry market- generally and in Boston

• Uncover target audiences’ goals, pain points, frustrations, needs, and motivations regarding their online and in-person dental experiences

• Learn about Soap Dental’s competitor’s strengths and weaknesses

Assumptions

• Soap Dental’s primary source of marketing is word of mouth and referrals from friends, family, and acquaintances.

• Customers prefer to book appointments online rather than over the phone

• Customers’ need information regarding dental insurance that is accepted

Secondary Research

Market Research

My first step was to conduct initial market research to help me better understand market trends and the dental landscape. Gaining a high-level understanding of market trends offers insight into who Soap Dental’s patients are and the context in which they operate.

Key Findings: Appointments

• 85% of all dental appointments are still scheduled with a phone call

• 43% of patients look for doctors & dentist after business hours

• 86% of potential new patients who reach voicemail do not leave a message or schedule an appointment.

Key Findings: Referrals and Review

• Referrals account for nearly 72% of all new business

• 83% of customers say they don’t trust advertising at all. By contrast, 91% say they will read and trust online reviews

• 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal referral.

Key Findings: Post COVID

• 90% of Americans believe that maining oral health is essential to proecting their overall health during the pandemic

• 93% of americans plan to visit the dentist in 2021

Competitive Analysis

Next, to identify opportunities in the market, I analyzed three direct and 1 indirect competitors to Soap Dental within the local area. I assesed their strengths and weaknesses in solving similar problems. This helped identify customer expectation and uncover areas where we can refine our strategy in the design process. From this exercise, it became evident that Soap Dental was at a disadvantage in meeting their patient expectation.

Provisional Personas

Based on the data we have gathered from our market research and competitive analysis, three provisional personas were created. This will help identify Soap Dental’s potential patients serving as hypothetical patients and help me identify participants for my Primary research.

Assumptions Validated

Soap Dental’s primary source of marketing is word of mouth and referrals from friends, family, and acquaintances.

• Soap Dental’s primary source of marketing is word of mouth and referrals from friends, family, and acquaintances.

  Validated: 8/8 participants said they went to Soap Dental for services because of a referral from friends, family, and acquaintances.

• Customers prefer to book appointments online rather than over the phone

  Validated: 7/8 participants expressed frustration over not being able to schedule appointments online

• Customers’ need information regarding dental insurance that is accepted

  Validated: 7/8 participants noted that they need confirmation if the dental office accepts their dental insurance.

 User Persona

Now that I have a better understanding of the dental landscape and my user’s goals and needs, I created a fictional user persona to represent key characteristics and behaviors of my users. This will me stay focus on solving for the most essential problems and whom we are designing for.

Meet, Elizabeth, a 31-year-old Clinical Dietitian in Boston, MA. She is new to the Boston Area and is an health enthusiast.

Having understood for whom we are designing for from our research phase, we next want to define the problem that we are solving for.

To clearly frame the problem the we are solving for, utilizing my empathy map I created Point of View (POV) statements. This will help translate my research findings into an actionable problem statement that will help ideate in a goal oriented manner. To do so, I rephrased my POV statements into How-Might We (HMW) statements. These statements will help prepare for innovative solutions through brainstorming.

Using my HMW statements, I conducted three-minute brainstorming sessions using the mind mapping technique. The goal of this exercise was to brainstorm as many solutions to our persona’s problems as possible with a focus on quantity over quality.

 Every business strives to provide the best customer experience they possibly can. Being a brand new business, Soap Dental must first focus on their customers most essential needs and primary frustrations.

Project Goals

To begin strategizing on where to put our focus, I assembled a Venn diagram to clearly define the business goals, user goals, and technical considerations. The overlapping sections represents the common goals between each respective parties helping us focus on the essential goals and ensure all parties align.

 Project Roadmap

Before diving into the design execution aspect, we want to first strategize and prioritize what features and elements are critical that needs to be implemented upon launch. Referencing the solutions from my brainstorming session, I created a comprehensive product roadmap. This details a list of features and elements into four categories: Must-Have (P1), Nice to have (P2), Surprising & Delightful (P3), and Can-Come-Later (P4). Items on the list are sorted based on two benchmarks, impact and time needed to implement.

Site Map

Similar to preparing blueprints for a house, we want to define the structure of our website. Thus a sitemap was assembled to help visualize and demonstrate the hierarchical structure that includes our proposed pages and features for Soap Dental’s website.

 UI Requirements

Once key screens were determined in my sitemap, I assembled a UI requirement document that will outline specific elements and features that will need to be implemented. This will serve as a living document for both designer and developer as a reference. This document elaborates essential pages, features, elements, and detailing actions needed in order for each task to be completed.

 Task Flow

Before constructing the website, I must first understand the needs of my users and the series of actions the user will need to take in order to achieve their goal. Below I have defined an example of a task that Elizabeth would like to complete and demonstrated steps she will need to take to accomplish the three task.

 User Flow

Taking the task flow one step further, I created a user flow to better understand how users could interact with the website. It outlines all possible scenarios, options, errors, dependencies, and outcomes. View here to see Elizabeth’s tasks and how she can be moving through the website to accomplish her goals.

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Once I decided the visual direction of the layout I want to go for, I started to digitalize a mid-fidelity version of the wireframe. This is a quick and easy way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artifacts. Most importantly, it allows me to check and test functionality early on.

Responsive Wireframes

In additional to designing desktop wireframes, to ensure users have a consistent experience across all devices, mid-fidelity wireframes were designed for tablet and mobile as well.

Prototype

In the Prototype phase, I built a scaled-down version of the product to test usability and feasibility of our interaction. This will help reduce user friction, eliminate errors, and uncover mistakes and false assumptions. Using Figma, connections and interaction elements were added to my mid-fidelity prototypes in order for my users to complete each task.

Task Includes:

• Please find the full insurance listing 

• Please find Soap Dentals’ service listing 

• Please contact and send a message to Soap Dental 

• Please schedule an appointment and submit form. 

Usability Testing Plan

Next we brought the mock prototypes to be tested for users to interact with. Prior to conducting, a structured usability test plan was assembled to document objectives, task, method, and script to serve as a guide and ensure testing is consistent across all participants.

The think-aloud method was the primary method as it will encourage users to vocalize their thoughts, frustrations, actions, and decisions to reveal what users are experiencing as they complete each task.

Testing Objectives

• Observe how successful current design allows users to complete their task.

• Uncover pain points users encounter when completing their task.

• Understand user’s journey navigation when completing their task scenarios. 

• Uncover opportunities to improve usability.

Assumptions

• Expected Completion Rate: 100% of participants will be able to complete all the task since participants recruited will have experience navigating dental websites.

• Error-Free Rate: all participants are expected to meet 95% error-free rate and anticipant roughly 3 mistakes (3% error rate). The prototype is still in the early stages and not fully functional or interactive yet therefore there may be some slips. 

Usability Testing

A total of eight moderated usability tests were conducted remotely. Participants were asked to complete four tasks whiling sharing their screens and encouraged to vocalize their thoughts, frustrations, actions, and decisions.

• Participants: 8

• Age Range: 26-38

• Criteria:

  • Must have been a patient at Soap Dental

  • Experience navigating a dental website

• Completion Rate: 100%

• Average Error-Free Rate: 98%

Usability Testing Finding

After each session, a transcript was assembled for each participant detailing each testing and noting my observation of their interaction with the prototype, comments, mistakes, slips, and confusions that was expressed in the process. This transcript serves as raw data that will aid in uncovering user’s patterns and behavior.

Affinity Map

The results from the usability testing was summarized by creating an affinity map. Feedback is organized into different categories. It is effective in identifying patterns and frustrations that users has when interacting with the prototype uncovering areas of improvement based on priority levels. 

Each participant was assigned a different color sticky note. Each note capturing their highlighted feedback and then categorized patterns by observations and frustrations. For each pattern from frustrations, I uncovered one insight, and generated one recommendation. I then ranked the recommendation based on priority level to be revise key friction that users experienced.

Insights

• 6/8 participants did not find “Dental Insurance” information tab right away

Updates to Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Due to time and resource limitations, revisions were implemented based on the priority level of the recommendations summarized in the affinity map.

For Soap Dental, the primary revision is adjusting the dental insurance information tab to be visible on the navigation bar to reduce users frustrating in locating the information.

 Mood Board

Before diving into the visuals and logo, I created a Mood Board using Pinterest to gather inspiration that best represents Soap Dental’s brand attributes: Modern, Friendly, Professional, Neutral and Fresh.

Logo

A logo is essential to further establish Soap Dental’s brand identity. Before digitalizing, I brainstormed ideas and concepts and sketched ideas on paper ensuring brand attributes are incorporated. I then selected my top design ensuring logo is scalable to be digitalized.

Style Tile

To continue developing the visual style of Soap Dental, I created a style tile. The style tile serves as a synthesizing document that describes and demonstrates Soap Dental’s brand standard that includes the logo design, typography, color palette, and imagery that serves as a guide for the UI design.

Final Prototype

After defining Soap Dental’s visual elements, I implemented these elements to built the high-fidelity pages.

Reflection 

This project was a great learning experience and was such a pleasure to have the opportunity to work so closely with a stakeholder on a new local business. The biggest hurdle was coming up with solutions that are compatible and easy to implement with Soap Dental’s platform. There were technical limitations and restrictions it terms of implementing the most obviously solution.

Another constraint in our design process was the lack of teammates, a roadblock that became evident during the brainstorming session. While many solutions were derived from these sessions, however creativity was limited.

Additionally, while analysis competitors and existing dental businesses in the market, roughly 85% of business need patients to call in order to make an appointment. Therefore uncovering common patterns to resolve that user frustration hasn’t been truly established in the marketplace.

Design Implementation & Handoff

Since the design has been tested and priority revisions have been implemented, it is ready to enter the development phase. We will use collaboration tools to handoff the work to developers and assist with any follow-up questions.

Maintenance

Although testing is the final phase of the design thinking process, the iterative process does not end here. Updates and revisions will continue to exist in the future, and will be addressed based on the priority levels.