Improving Dental Experience
Type: Service design
Timeline: 3 months(Sep. — Dec.2020)
Contribution: Interview, Persona, Journey Map, Blueprint Map, HMW, Brainstorming, Storyboard, Testing
Team: Arvin Farahmand, Ella Swan, Jiaxin Li, Stian Raa
01 Overview
The project is a group project of the course TPD4156 Design 7 — Service Design. In this project, we collaborate with SINTEF, a private non-profit research institute. The goal of the project was to design a service that improves the dental treatment experience for adults with dental anxiety. The final design comes with a physical stress ball and digital solutions.
Background
It’s estimated that 36% of the population is affected by some degree of dental anxiety, 15–20% is affected by more extreme cases and around 5–10% avoid going to the dentist completely. Dental phobia has proven to have a direct effect on the quality of life. Various reasons can cause dental anxiety, such as traumatic experiences which happened to themselves, or indirect experiences from others, dental equipment and its sound.
Dental anxiety is the biggest reason why people postpone or skip treatments, which can result in worse condition of teeth and more unpleasant and complicated treatments.
SINTEF has an ongoing project about helping people with dental anxiety by developing new digital solutions, like digital consultation. This project is in collaboration with SINTEF.
In the beginning, we wanted to focus on the children from age 8 to 12, since this is the age group when dental anxiety develops and we want to stop it as early as possible. However, due to the corona and ethical concern, it’s more difficult to get in touch with this user group. So we decided to move on with adults.
02 Explore
2.1 User interview
We have conducted digital interviews with 5 users, 2 dentists and 1 designer from SINTEF, the goal is to understand user’s dental health habits and and experiences of dental treatment. We also wanted to know why they have dental anxiety, their symptoms and how they deal with it.
The users we interviewed had different levels of anxiety ranging from no anxiety to some anxiety. Unfortunately, we did not find any people with severe dental anxiety.
2.2 Persona
After our interviews, we did a thematic analysis using an affinity map to find patterns and create themes. We divided the interview notes into small pieces of meaning units and put them onto the sticky notes in Miro. Similar sticky notes were grouped same categories, such as dental habits, dental health problems, dental experience and so on. This process helped us to create personas.
We have created 3 personas based on the severity of dental anxiety. Since we haven’t interviewed any users with severe dental anxiety, the persona who was most afraid of visiting the dentist was created based on the dentists’ description.
As an extra measure to avoid prejudice and stereotypical assumptions, we have used illustrations instead of stock photos in our personas.
2.3 Journey map
At the end of each interview, we drew a journey map together with the user based on a template we had created. We found this method very useful and could provide more depths and details to our understanding of their dental experiences compared to interview questions.
Several individual journey maps were combined based on the persona.
From the journey maps, we discovered some opportunities and have selected the following ones for further development:
- How can we inform the user about the process?
- How can we involve the user in the treatment process?
- How can we help the user feel more in control?
- How can we make the experience feel shorter and less uncomfortable?
2.4 Service blueprint map
A service blueprint shows the customer’s journey, but also the underlying frontstage and backstage staff process, and support process.
We decided to draw a service blueprint map because we wanted to try this tool. This was a useful way to demonstrate what we do know, and also to expose what we don’t know. The process of making it has forced us to think more holistically about how our solutions can affect not only the users, but also the dentists and other staff.
03 Ideation
3.2 How Might We(HMW)
We rewrote the opportunities we found from the journey maps above into How Might We (HMW) questions from different angles, like removing the bad, adding goods and so on. Following are four HMW questions that we chose based on categories such as realistic, relevant, and inspiring.
- How might we make the dental experience more interesting?
- How might we help the patient understand the treatment and express their thoughts?
- How might we help adults who are going to the dentist trust the dentist and that the treatment is helpful?
- How might we help adults with different degrees of dental anxiety get a better experience throughout the treatment by involving them in the process?
3.2 Brainstorming, crazy 8, voting
04 Final Product
4.1 Idea description
· Stress Ball and Ankle Bracelet
Our solutions consist of a stress ball and an ankle bracelet, which can connect with each other wirelessly.
When the patient feels stress and squeezes the stress ball, the ankle bracelet will tighten around the dentist’s leg. If the patient squeezes the stress ball forcefully and reaches a threshold, the ankle bracelet will change to vibration, to alert the dentist that the patient might need a break.
Our solution can not only help the patient to release stress by just holding and squeezing the stress ball, but also helps to communicate the stress to the dentist and empathize with the patient, which is especially important when the patient can’t speak with tools in the mouth.
· Consultation, with additional information in the SMS message
Our solution can help the patient select a suitable dentist and build trust prior to appointment as well as get more knowledge about the treatment and therefore be able to prepare mentally and feel control.
Part 1: The patient can choose the most suitable dentist on the website, which could include all dental clinics and dentists in Norway, The dentist or dental clinics could be sorted based on their rating or other information. It should also be possible to receive recommendations based on preferences, such as dentists who are specialised in treating odontophobia.
Part 2: The patient can book a consultation with the dentist, either digitally or in person. Here, the patient has the opportunity to share worries, and talk about dental anxiety or other dental problems. The dentist can explain how he or she can improve the experience, and for example, introduce the stress ball as a solution. The digital consultation is not a substitute for a normal physical appointment, instead, it’s a reassurance that you like the dentist and believe he or she can help you in a suitable way before committing to the physical appointment. If the dentist gives a good impression, the patient can book a normal physical appointment afterwards.
Part 3: Two days before the dental treatment appointment, the patient will receive a message reminder of the appointment. This message contains general information like the date, time, location, as well as a link. The link will direct the patient to a webpage with relevant information. This could include a step-by-step explanation of the treatment, how to prepare for the treatment, and suggestions of how to improve the experience. Here, the stress ball solution can be introduced. The information could be presented as a combination of text and illustrations, and possibly videos.
4.2 Storyboard
4.2 Testing
