MARKETING SERVICE APPLICATION DESIGN
MARKETING SERVICE APPLICATION DESIGN
MARKETING SERVICE APPLICATION DESIGN
MARKETING SERVICE APPLICATION DESIGN
Patient Acquisition SaaS Platform to SMB Private Healthcare Practices
Managing leads and Return on Investment (ROI) represents a crucial facet of dental practice management, entailing diverse challenges for practitioners. In the contemporary competitive healthcare landscape, dental practices must adeptly navigate a dynamic market while adopting efficient strategies to allure and retain patients. From capturing potential leads and transforming them into loyal clients to optimizing investment returns, dental practices confront an array of obstacles. Observing that numerous dental clinics encounter these challenges due to outdated technology, the owner of Lasso was inspired to develop an innovative application. This app aims to assist dental clinics in generating more leads, tracking potential patients, managing online reviews, and monitoring ROI through dynamic data analysis.
Goal, Problem, and Scope
The goal is to design the first patient acquisition and ROI platform to dental practices. I take over this project from the early discovery phase and contribute to the full product development and release cycle. My responsibilities include gathering user requirements, identifying high-value touch points to increase engagement, creating user flows, designing UI elements, and user testing. I work closely with software engineers, quality control, user acceptance testing, and iterating on customer feedback including designing marketing and business insights applications that are simple to use and integrate with a wide range of external data sources.
My Role
• Research
• UX|UI design
• Facilitate workshops, interviews, testing, etc.
Project Process
Although I followed the design thinking process, this time I worked at a startup company where the CEO and CTO participated directly in the design. I needed to adjust my strategy for each step. A high-level introduction is presented in the sections below.
Step 1: Discovery research about the dental industry
Step 2: Evaluate the current work process
Step 3: Conducting user research and competitor Analysis
Step 4: Facilitate workshops to understand users
Step 5: Refine information architecture
Step 6: Develop wireframes and prototypes
Step 7: Design and ideation
Step 8. Testing
End Users
Dental clinic front desk staff, administrators, and business owners
Major Contributions
(6 weeks)
Design Challenges
Major Achievement
& Results
Project Highlight Summary
Because this project is under a tight deadline, after researching how dental offices operate, I facilitated user research workshops and sent out surveys to understand each user group. Then I started to do a competitive analysis and evaluate the current study at the same time. I rebuilt the entire app flow, branding, page structure, and interface interaction to meet users' needs. Then I spent a couple of weeks doing several ideations with the CEO, CTO, Sales team, Customer Service team, and engineering team. Below are screenshots are some of the project heights. A lot of details regarding discovery, interviews, workshops, discussion, ideation, refinement, and testing process happened behind the scenes.
-
Facilitated user research workshops and collected data via surveys. This step helps me understand users' backgrounds, work environments, behavior, responsibility, pain points, and motivation. Based on this study, we revised the user flow (the front desk doesn't reply to reviews for example) and established the design direction.
-
Turned ideas into reality with design. The original thought from CEO was just filled with full of content without much logic and mental flow. Before both patient and lead flow data are mixed on one ROI page under the same filter criteria with different meanings. I separated them into tabs and designed the data flow from general to break down into details. This logic is applied to other pages. It built up a pattern for users to navigate and perform tasks easier. On the settings page, I designed a way to show the hierarchy (customer/group/location) that helps the organization track individual clinic performance.
-
Defined on the page layout, interface, and interface direction
-
Utilized ChatGPT as a UX design assistant throughout the entire design process
In a fast-paced startup environment, I conducted research, competitive analysis, and refined user journeys; designed the navigation structure, page layout, branding, typography, color theme, interface interaction, ROI dashboard, and style guide; conducted usability testing and ultimately handed off the design work to the development team.
Being the first acquisition platform for the dental business, we lack the resources to study other applications. Additionally, the tight deadline poses another major challenge. I need to help the CEO and CTO set design priorities and quickly iterate based on the feedback from micro end-user testing.
Major Design Process Walkthrough
Personas
There are three user groups that will potentially use this app:
-
Front Desk Employee: Typically, employees in this setting do not hold a college degree, and the majority of the workforce is female. From the interview, I gathered that they lack the time to use an additional app during business hours due to the heavy workload involved in handling income patients, scheduling with the PMS (Patient Manager System), making phone calls, and dealing with insurance matters - which constitute their primary daily tasks. The PMS app itself is data-driven, with complex content and interface interactions. As a result, reducing their workload and enhancing their experience emerged as the foremost priorities for our design considerations and strategic UX research.
-
Office Manager: Office managers are not the primary users in this scenario due to their specific job responsibilities. Nevertheless, they can step in to handle front desk work if there is a shortage of staff.
-
Business Owner: Business owners are not likely to dedicate significant time to this app; their focus will likely be on ROI-related data. Moreover, they might prefer using the mobile app over the web app more frequently.
Competitive Analysis
Since Lasso is pioneering the first app targeting dental office ROI and patient acquisition platform, there are not many similar apps available for conducting competitive analysis. Currently, the market only offers one app for dental offices that includes ROI and marketing services features. To comprehend its functionality, pain points, accessibility issues, and potential feature improvements, I conducted a heuristic evaluation.
-
The content and features are quite busy
-
Accessibility issues
-
Some interactions and information are not very intuitive
-
Not design for low tech skilled person
Competitive analysis
User Research and User Flow
Besides doing online research, I also facilitated a series of workshops, met with end users, and worked with the CEO and CTO to collect our findings. Then I created the user flow
UX Design Ideation
I worked with CEO, CTO, and engineers directly during the design ideation. Based on the users' feedback, I redesigned the original approach to make the task flow more intuitive.
Original
approach
.jpg)
Design refinement
Design ideation
Usability Testing, Refinement
I conducted usability testing with end users and used chatGPT as an assistant to provide more insights. Heatmap is another tool to help me analyze focus and eye-tracking flow.
Usability testing
Heatmap test results
ChatGPT insights
UI Design Direction
Through user research, I understand that the target users possess a high school education and limited tech skills. The system that they need to use for their daily work is an outdated and complicated application. They are usually too busy to find extra time to work on side work. This app is not essential for their daily tasks, my design approach leans towards a user-friendly, enjoyable interface interaction with minimal effort.
Front Desk Daily System
The system the front desk is using for daily tasks
The patient acquisition system interface
ROI dashboard for
business owner to track
performance
Other Contributions and Next Step
To enhance production, I shared numerous AI and ChatGPT resources and courses with the company, while also recommending an efficient way to work with a design system. However, due to the rapid pace of the process, documentation was not adequately prioritized. The subsequent phase will continue to work on further UI design, encompassing usability tests and comprehensive documentation.
Takeaways
My experience collaborating with a startup company exposed me to a dynamic and fast-paced working environment. I became actively involved in project strategy and task management processes, gaining insight into the perspectives of both the CTO and CEO. During this time, I embraced the notion that translating user story narratives into hypotheses offers a more efficient approach to engaging with executives. This approach aids in selecting optimal UX design solutions and establishing a clear success matrix.
