Designing Delta Dental’s Direct-to-Consumer Product
Delta Dental of California wanted to expand its direct-to-consumer revenue channel by launching an online Discount Dental Plan. This would help them stay competitive with other healthcare providers who are also trying to reach the uninsured market.
WHY STATEMENT: Help deliver oral care savings for the 74 million uninsured
Dental costs are a constant factor for millions of uninsured Americans to neglect oral health care and live through cavities, tooth pain, and discomfort. Dental discount plans are common but often it is hard to know whether there is a dentist in-network within the patients’ region and what would the discounts be for the treatments under consideration.
Project Summary
Project Team and Process
Product Strategy and Research
For our exploratory research I decided to combine 2 research techniques in one session. In the first half of the session we learned a bit about the user and their approach to dental wellness in general and then showed storyboards with 3 different concepts to understand which experience resonates with them and why.
Understand a bit about the user – who they are in their own words
Understand their process about getting dental care
Understand how they value dental care in general – financial prioritization around dental care expenses
Understand which storyboard concept resonated with the participants and why?
Drill deeper into concepts well received by the participants
Drill deeper into comparative selection of one concept over the other or parts of concepts they related to.
Armed with research about our users we set to establish our personas. We looked at competitors, defined the brand experience and established a product vision through a series of workshops. With this product strategy in place we were able to define problems to focus on craft ideas around how to deliver value to customers
Competitive Analysis, Personas and Vision Setting
Define and Concept
After establish a design direction we generated some ideas and concepts through a series of workshops and reviews. We leveraged the design personas to frame and measure value of each idea.
Sprint Cycles and Usability Testing
We created designs in three 2-week sprints with a usability test at the end of each sprint and tested the prototype from early stages when it was in wireframe (lo-fidelity stage). This gave us feedback on the flow and allowed us to work on visual polish in parallel and improve the design fidelity with each sprint and by the final sprint we had a strong user flow with hi-fidelity mockups of the end-end flow.
Application flow from shopping experience with marketing material, buy experience to enable subscription and use flow to find dentists and schedule appointments using a clear information architecture
We explored multiple visual styles and developed a responsive web experience to realize the full product vision. Dentist finder became a crucial piece of design and a factor for patients to select this plan.
Shop and Buy pages
Account and Use pages
