“Say Aah!” — Behind the Scenes of SomiaCX Independent Project: Pediatric Dental Experience 🦷 🪥
In this article, I will share some stories and lessons learned from our independent project of 2023.
When you go to a dentist, they ask you to open your mouth, and say “aah..”
When you go with plan A and it goes south, you say “aah..” out of anxiety or confusion.
When you do an exploratory independent study and end up learning new things, now you say “AHA!”.
Chapter 1: The beginning
The project started with a pure fascination of mine towards a dental clinic experience after an annual dental checkup with my dentist. I praised my dentist for her effort in providing fun elements to the children’s dental experience. I genuinely appreciated her efforts. It’s no secret that a visit to a dentist is not a visit to a candy store. Studies showed even adults are anxious to visit a dentist, let alone a child.
The clinic provides a small corner filled with children's storybooks, toys, and coloring sheets. Even the children get to display their ‘artwork’ on the clinic notice board.
My dentist also set up a small TV to ‘distract’ the children during the treatment. The children will be handed the remote control to pick their favorite YouTube videos. For adults, the default setting was to play instrumental nature sounds. I bet she wouldn’t mind if I requested her to play my favorite YouTube channels too, but I was too embarrassed to ask 😂
The dental visit was memorable for me. I ended up sharing my experience over a water cooler chat with my colleagues. That’s how we, a bunch of curious design researchers with peaking interest, kicked off the research project about children’s dental experience.
What’s so special about children’s dental experience?
Watch this video below.
Going to the dentist is not easy even for adults. It makes people anxious and uneasy.
In Indonesia, where dental care awareness is not high, most children‘s first dentist visit is to get their first milk tooth pulled out. In worse cases, when they have severe cavities. Hence, the first dental visit is a big deal.
So, we came up with the How Might We statement.
How might we create a pleasant dental experience for children?
Chapter 2: Beyond talking to the stakeholders
Initially, we kicked off the project with the goal of discovering opportunities to improve children’s experience during a dentist visit. We talked to dentists, children, and parents to learn more about their experiences and the challenges they face. To get more perspectives, we also consulted with an early childhood counselor who shared best practices when engaging with children.
As an independent project, we treated the research quite differently. We did not have a rigid planning with plans A, B, C, and D for backups. The participant recruitment process was done during the research. We used our personal connections and social media to recruit parents who were willing to share their stories with us. Unexpectedly, our followers on Instagram had plenty of stories to tell when it came to their children’s dentist visits.
We did something different in this project. Instead of limiting ourselves to interviews and shadowing to collect the data, we played around with other methods to enrich our study. Yes, we did a series of interviews with the dentists, nurses, and an early childhood counselor. We also gathered some parents for a mini FGD session to learn from their perspectives.
How about the children?
To learn from the children, we did 2 things: 1) Fly on the Wall and 2) Immersion.
1) Fly on the Wall
We did a Fly on the Wall for the observatory study. If you are not familiar with the Fly on the Wall, it is basically an observation conducted from afar in the natural setting of the scene without actively engaging with the participants. Like a fly, you are quietly observing.
Before starting the session, I asked for signed permission from the dentist team and the parent. Although the patient I was observing was a 10-year-old child, I also explained what I would do and asked for his consent.
I also gave all of my participants options to remain anonymous, I promised them to blur out their faces and not reveal their identities. Upon getting all the permission, I followed both parent and patient to the dentist’s office for the observation.
I stood quietly in the corner of the office, observing the treatment procedures and the interactions happening among the dentist, nurses, patient, and parent. I took notes and videos of the procedures from the moment we entered the room to the moment they left the room.
It was my first time doing a Fly on the Wall as a design researcher, not my first experience with the technique though. I used to do similar observational studies back in my college days as a psych student. The difference was in the way I documented the study. I used to take notes, but this time I relied heavily on the videos I took, the notes were secondary. It allowed me to fully capture all the things that were going on in front of me.
After the patient and the parent left the room, I sat down with the dentist for follow-up questions and also asked her to explain the tools she used with the patient earlier. I felt this flow was way less intrusive than asking questions in the middle of the session.
Since I was not engaging with any of them, I was not interrupting anything. The participants barely noticed me in the corner of the room, somehow allowing them to act naturally.
2) Immersion
Besides the observational study, in this project, our Principal Consultant, Sulis also conducted an immersive study to enrich the data collection. Sulis put on the parent hat and took her sons to a dentist for dental check-ups. From Sulis’ experience, we managed to capture how parent took their children for their 1st dentist visit and learned how the children felt before, during, and after the visit.
As a first-time visitor, Sulis also had to undergo the process that our participants went through. We took the empathize stage to the next level with the various data collection methods, again the privilege of independent research. We got to try out ways of documenting the research as a part of our experiments.
Chapter 3: “Are we answering the right questions?”
After a series of interviews, FGD, observations, debriefings, and unpackings, we started to see the light and question ourselves. Is the dentist visit experience itself the main problem that we need to answer? No. We realized there was a bigger question to answer.
It is not only about creating a better experience for children when visiting the dentist but boosting the awareness of dental care as well. It was just the tip of the iceberg. The problem to tackle is systemic. It goes the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child” as we learn that all the measures taken by the dentist and the parents will not be able to have a big impact without the involvement of many other parties.
This project led us to apply a System Thinking mindset to see the problem from different perspectives.
Initially, we thought it was only the triangle of children, parents, and dentists that played the roles. Then, upon applying the systems thinking mindset, we expanded the stakeholders or the network map. This opened up other important stakeholders in the system that play important roles, but tend to be overlooked. Have you spotted any stakeholders listed below that stood out for you?
Expanding the stakeholders mapping brought a new light to us. We saw the interactions and connections among the stakeholders.
Let me give you one example.
Dentists and other healthcare personnel have a mission to campaign for cavities prevention in children. This mission is also supported by oral care brands. They collaborated with schools for free dental checkups or built an app to help gamify the toothbrushing habit. Parents with high levels of awareness also do their best to ensure dental hygiene at home.
Wait, we tackle the tooth brushing. Now, how about the food the children consume? What about the snacks they eat? What about their lunch at school? You’d be surprised at how much sugar the children consume in a day!
The network map helped us see many different perspectives and opened up the possibilities of solutions.
Conclusion
There are two takeaways from this project for me:
- Pivoting in research
Research is all about answering the right question. If you start with the wrong question, a pivot is allowed. Again, if you have the privilege of time and resources. In client projects, you will need to convince and get buy-ins to do this.
2. Healthcare is complex and it takes collective efforts to build a great system
A child's health status does not solely rely on the parents’ care. The healthcare personnel, government, to their schools have some responsibilities as well. This project opened my eyes to the complexities of the healthcare systems. It is indeed take a village to raise a child.
🥁THE REPORT 🥁
We have launched our report! 🎉
In this report, we share how we applied the Systems Thinking Framework to understand the relationship between stakeholders in the Indonesian children’s dental health space.
Read it here.
Shoot us questions, and leave comments here! We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you for reading.
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To follow along Somia CX’s journey of exploring Systems Thinking, check out our Systems Thinking Publication at Medium, here.
Chelsea is a design researcher with a background in Psychology and lives on a K-shaped island in Central Indonesia. She is a consultant in Somia Customer Experience. Connect with her on Linkedin.
