Overview
Role
Meet the Team
Undergraduate,
Team Member
- Richie Arkanoff
- Evan Burr
- Janna Johns
- Jackson Murray
- Robert Porter
- Aidan Sabatino
- Alex Schrankel
- Qimei Fu
- Ryoma Okano
Project Description
Dental practice employees handling EFT payments currently struggle to navigate the EFT set up process, and they need a way to easily access multiple dental insurance websites and important information to set up EFT payments.
Deliverables
A clickable mid-fidelity Dental WebSmart web app prototype. Design documentation outlining our process and design rationale.
Timeline
Dental WebSmart supported the team with a 16-week project, which terminated at the end of the Spring Semester.
Background Project Information
About Dental WebSmart
Dental WebSmart’s main mission is to improve dental practices cash flow by reducing payment turn around to 2-7 days rather than the previous 30-90 days through the use of Electronic Transfer Fund (EFT) payments. To accomplish this, they have developed custom solutions to organize information needed to complete the EFT application process.
Who are the users?
Dental Practice Administration handling EFT payments who…
usually outsource to our sponsor to set up their EFT payments.
are used to working with technology on a regular basis.
What is the problem?
In dental insurance, there are a few ways to complete dental practice cash flows and payment transactions. One of these payment options is EFTs. The EFT process is extremely efficient, saving dental practices weeks at a time.
Although, the dental practice employees handling EFT payments currently struggle to navigate the EFT set up process, and they need a way to easily access multiple dental insurance websites and important information to set up EFT payments.
What is an EFT?
The electronic transfer of money from one bank account to another through computer-based systems and without the direct intervention of bank staff.
Project Goals
Redesign Dental WebSmart’s current web application as an organizational tool to support dental practice administration to set up EFT Payments.
Create an onboarding process that allows dental practice admin to easily upload and access documents and information needed to set up their EFT payments.
Test our prototypes with dental practices to inform our iterations regarding functionality, and deliver a final Mid-Fi Prototype to our sponsor
Describing the Current Dental WebSmart Experience
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Articulate the current EFT setup process by researching what it is and how it works.
Investigate the existing user flow and adapt the flow to fit our dental practice administration user group.
Identify information within the current Dental WebSmart platform that could be eliminated or combined into other tabs to streamline the EFT set up process.
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EFT Research - Purpose: Clarify terms and processes needed to discuss the current experience.
Site Map - Purpose: visualize the current flow.
Content Audit - Purpose: identify functional necessities in the current site.
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An outline of our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) tabs and features needed for dental practice admin to set up EFT Payments.
EFT Research
Goals: Understand the process from the perspective of the dental practices. Identify advantages and disadvantages. Gain insights into the set up process and components of an EFT.
Main Takeaways:
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By switching from paper payment to EFT payments, average payment time is reduced from approximately 90 days to 3 - 5 days.
EFT setup process is tedious because of a confusing onboarding process and fees that are incorrectly associated with direct EFT payments
Benefits include increase cash flow, payment security, and time efficiency
Receiving portal access revealed setup steps which include importing documents and dental practice information, as well as insurance carriers steps.
Primary Research Overview
After gaining an understanding of the problem space, our team conducted interviews to understand these issues from the perspective of the Dental Practice.
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Clarify the relationship between dental practices and insurance companies.
Examine dental practices knowledge of the EFT setup process.
Identify potential problems dental practices have encountered with EFT transactions.
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How did you go about setting up EFT payments for your business?
What benefits have you gained since switching to EFT payments?
What are some issues you face when using EFTs?
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Validation
Our participants validated the need for a centralized place to help register for EFT payments.
Dental practices find the current EFT process to be tedious and time consuming.
Dental practices who use EFT payments save time and have more cash flow.
User Needs
Dental practices need to know the status of their EFT payment with each insurance carrier.
Our portal must include documents that show payment information and status of these payments.
Pain Points
Dental practices find the current EFT process to be tedious and time consuming.
Most patients at dental practices have insurance so it can be overwhelming to keep their patients accounts in balance especially if the payment takes 30 days.
Our team interviewed four dental practice managers. These managers are responsible for setting up the organization and coordination of documents for insurance companies. We interviewed these specifics people because they would be the primary stakeholders interacting with the new web portal we are creating.
Interview Quotes:
After our team synthesized all the interview data, we were able to identify pain points and needs of the users that we needed to address in our wireframes and prototypes. These interviews also validated the need for an onboarding process to help support and inform the Dental Practice in their transition to EFT payments.
Creating a Dental WebSmart Site Map
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Learn about the current Dental WebSmart Portal via the visualization of tabs, content, and links.
Identify relationships within the website and understand how content is connected.
Get a big picture idea of the functionality, organization, and navigation.
Our team analyzed the old Dental WebSmart portal to understand the linked structure connecting pages and compile a site map. We accomplished this through interacting with the portal and then mapping out the interactions between each page or screen. Through this process, we identified the functionality and relationships of each content aspect. This helped us to gain a sense of the current uses of the portal and identify features for further inspection. The site make would act as the stepping stone to conducting a proper content audit.
Outcomes:
Identified all the features within the existing Dental WebSmart portal
Identified interactions between all working components in the portal
Understood which features are self contained within the portal
Using this site map, our team began a content audit to help us further inspect features of the Dental WebSmart portal. This site map really helped our team make sure that we did not overlook necessary features that are necessary to implement into the new portal design.
Dental WebSmart Content Audit
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Understand the function of each piece of content.
Grasp how everything interacts together.
Understand which content is currently prioritized.
After creating a site map and gather screenshots of the current portal, our team used Miro to annotate the website’s content. Together, we identified the functions and relationships of each piece of content in relation to a dental practice. Below is an example screenshot of one of the website screens with annotations.
Outcome:
The current portal is confusing and overly detailed for what dental practices need.
Infographics of clients location and invoices are unnecessary for new user group.
Application and carrier tabs are redundant.
After analyzing the needs of the users in the current Dental WebSmart portal and the irrelevant information from the perspective of the dental practice, we dived into designing iterations of the new portal, focusing on how administrators like Elsa would benefit from this redesign.
The Reimagined Dental WebSmart Experience
Elsa works as a dental practice administrator and handles EFT payments for her practice. She wishes to utilize our Dental WebSmart platform as an organizational tool to set up EFT dental insurance payments. Below is the step by step process she would take to set up her practice’s EFT payments.
First, Elsa will create her account and submit a one-time payment to use Dental WebSmart. Below are the login and payment screens initiating this process.
After receiving a confirmation email, Elsa signs in to the portal.
Elsa arrives at an introductory screen. She reads on and begins to prepare herself, locating relevant documents within her office and on her computer.
In our testing, we found that practice administrators like Elsa needed a way to streamline their workflow and reduce the amount of time spent searching for documents. Retrieving these documents first makes Elsa’s experience and access to information much easier.
Using the retrieved documents from earlier with a few glances, Elsa can fill out her Dental Practice’s Information quickly.
Using the Browse Files function, she is able to bring in the needed Dental Practice Documents from her computer, allowing Elsa to maintain all her files in a central location.
All of Elsa’s insurance carriers will auto-populate into the system. Each carrier has its own external link that will take Elsa to the EFTs for that insurance provider.
As Elsa is completing EFT payments on insurance websites, she can use the quick access pull out window to copy over application information quickly, making the application process much faster.
Hurray! Elsa has completed the steps to apply for EFT payments.
She can now utilize Dental WebSmart as an organizational tool by accessing the following elements to help her keep up with her EFT payments.
Now Elsa can keep track of the status of her EFT applications by manually inputting whether they are completed, in progress, or incomplete. With a single glance, Elsa knows if she is ready to complete EFTs with an insurance carrier or not.
Under the carriers tab, Elsa can explore details specific to each Insurance Carrier within the Insurance Information column by clicking the Details button. For each insurance carrier, Elsa can access the Carrier Contact Information, as well as take any notes she may have.
Additionally, Elsa can access the support page to find answers to her questions relating to specific Insurance Carrier, EFT, and Dental WebSmart related topics. Support articles could include photos, videos and contact information relating to specific topics.
Rebuilding Dental WebSmart from the Practice Perspective
“How do we make the EFT set up process accessible and usable for those
who have never walked through this process before?”
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Redefine the layout of UI elements within the portal to create a more user friendly experience.
Streamline the process to help Dental Practice Employees better understand the EFT process, guide them to the website, and give them access to the documents needed to set up an electronic transfer.
Create sketches and wireframes based on our research and interviews in order to aid in our design process as well as our concept and usability testing with users.
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Sketching
How do we design the website from the perspective of a user with limited EFT knowledge and technical experience?
What elements do we change to improve the structure of the website as an organizational tool to support dental practice administration to track the EFT Payments application progress?
Wireframing
What can we improve in the designs from the sketching phase?
Build a platform that dental practice employees are able to easily understand.
Create an onboarding process that allows dental practice admin to easily upload and access documents and information needed to set up their EFT payments.
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New Carrier’s Tab
New Carrier’s Information Page
New Support Tab
Onboarding
Carriers Tab
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Show the link to the insurance company's website directly, so that users can open it to apply for EFTs without the extra step of finding it on the carrier info page.
As a dental practice will apply to EFT payment for multiple insurance companies and the application can take up to months to complete, it's useful for users to track their applications all in one place. We added the application status into the Carrier Tab so that the users can view the progress without checking into each Carrier Info tab.
Add the widget of users' information for the EFT application to copy and paste it to the application forms easily.
Previous Carrier's Tab
Redesigned Carrier's Tab
Carrier Information Page
Previous Carrier & Application Pages
Redesigned Combined Carrier Information Tab
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Merging Application page and Carrier Info page for easier navigation.
Instead of having two separate tabs for viewing the carriers' information, website link, and application updates, we centralize them together so that the users can see their notes about the carrier without extra clicks to navigate from the Carrier tab to the Application tab.
Support Tab
Previous Support Tab
Redesigned Support Tab
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Dental WebSmart has videos and articles about the process of setting up EFT payments and related problems. We redesigned the Membership Course tab into the Support tab to place all the resources for users to find answers to common questions.
The resources are categorized by topics for users to browse.
New Onboarding
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Guide new users through the preparation of applying for EFT payments.
Tooltips for explaining the use of each document and information.
Pop-ups for explaining information.
A pop-up is an element that can be brought up by selecting the Question Mark icons on the page. Each icon corresponds to a different explanation relating to the information next to the icon.
Wireframing
Our content audit and EFT research informed our MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which included an Insurance Carriers page, an Admin Panel, a Documents and information page, and a Support page; our MVP informed our wireframing thereafter.
Through our wireframing, we were identifying user needs within an onboarding walkthrough for users to be able to set up EFT payments easily.
Prototyping
Our goal with our prototypes was to focus on functionality, evaluating how intuitive the process of setting up EFT payments was for our users.
Evaluating: Does our solution make sense to Dental Practices?
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Examine the intuitiveness of the features of our prototypes.
Clarify the language used to match jargon used in their respective fields.
Consult testers on their opinion on the aesthetic quality.
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Usability Testing
Conduct 2 rounds of usability testing: one with Purdue Student (UX and unrelated majors) and one with a Dental Insurance Coordinator.
Sponsor Concept Testing
Conduct a walkthrough with our sponsor, Chris, to provide changes and guidance using EFT domain knowledge in the dental industry.
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They were satisfied with the overall functionality and appearance of the product. However, there were certain wording issues and missing information.
There were certain features that we did not foresee the possibility of implementing such as managing several offices out of one account.
Some things pointed out by Alicia include:
A mobile version would be useful.
Long term retention of users, especially since setting up an EFT is a one time process.
Usability Testing & Concept Testing
Example of a Task.
“How would you upload your W–9 form on this page?”
Changes informed by testing:
Consistency in the UI
Clarifying the function of certain icons
Identifying onboarding necessities
In total, we completed 8 usability and concept testing to evaluate our design. Our initial round of testing was with Purdue UX students. Our second round was non-UX-related students. Our third round was a dental insurance coordinator. And finally, the last round was with our sponsor, Chris Haines.
Reflection
Reflective Experience Takeaways:
“No correct way to do UX,”
At the end of the semester, I learned about all the other team’s projects. It was incredible to see how different the UX process can be. There are so many differ tools to collect data, analyze, and arrive at conclusion to support decision making
Asking questions isn’t bad, it is a good thing.
Understand what the goal is, where you are in the process, what you will do next, what is the best method for accomplishing your goals, and how will the team work together to accomplish the goals, - don’t just run through the motions, learn, and understand why we are doing UX this way
