A POS with payment plan

Date Jul 2021 –	Company Tuuthfairy Pay
Role Design Lead Made product design decisions and execute design from beginning to launch	Mission A easy to adopt payment plan for dental offices & patients

Overview

This project demonstrates how a product was designed and built from a single idea within limited time and resources. Through the process, we utilized rapid prototyping & guerrilla user testing to test out the idea in a short time and turned around to avoid the pitfalls.

Background & business goal

Tuuthfairy has a vision of shortening the revenue collection time for dental offices. Most dental offices in the US are small business owners, and most dental offices’ revenue cycle could be up 45 to 90 days, which could be risky for dentists.

We believed that if there is a better payment plan in place for the dental industry, it could help the dental office to collect money faster. The business goal was to enter the market of digital payment with payment plans for dental offices.

However, as a startup new to the market, we had many issues. Not only we are new to the payment market for dental offices, but also our understandings toward the payment collection are limited to our personal experiences of visiting dental offices.

Market research & findings

We conducted Guerilla user research and interviewed some close dental offices to understand the market and the need and the trends of the markets.

Through the conversation, we have some key takeaways:

Some offices are offering payment plans by split bills and charge patients periodically as a courtesy to their patients, which is labor heavy for dental offices.
61% of Americans cannot pay $1,000 in lump sum; 55% of Americans delay dental care due to cost.
There are some services in the markets providing installments for patients, but the process usually is time consuming. And their target is above $1k, while most of the bill of a visit is around $200.
Pay in 4 services start to get popular in the retailer space, but it’s not available in health care yet.

Through the research, our challenge turned into opportunity statement clearly:

“How might we provide an easy to use payment plan for dental?”

Design sprint to initial idea’s sketch to prototype

As the design lead, I gathered the stakeholders and led them through a design sprint. We started from understand our target clients, shared our understanding of the industry, revisited personas we had created.

Empathy Maps

Personas

At the end, the team sketched the storyboard:

And I turned them into the first design, and the engineers quickly prototyped it.

Guerrilla user testing & findings

We contacted one of our beta offices to test the prototype.

After 2 days, our assumptions of the products were fully overthrew, we had to remove the feature we believed in, and focused on the core — payment first.

Key Findings

~~Contactless check-in can lead to online payment later~~
For dental, most visits are covered by insurance. Check-in process is required for every visit, but payment is not, only about 1/3 of patients need to pay out of pocket.

~~While patient is waiting, we can soft sell the payment plan solution~~
Patients hardly need to wait at the sitting area, they usually arrive on time and are guided to lab the lab directly.

Version 1

Based on our learning in the guerrilla testing, we decided to embed the payment plan into the payment experience at the office. By using existing hardware in the market, we quickly assembled a basic payment terminal and launched our first version of the payment terminal.

V1 Charging terminal design, Android tablet

V1 Portal for patients design, mobile web

V1 Portal for dental offices, desktop web

Feedbacks for V1 & Findings

With confidence in our V1, we started deploying to our beta offices and sell the product.
I visited and observed how our early clients are using our product at the office, and have the following findings:

Key Findings

Words from dentist and office staff is the best way to sell the payment plan, patients feel pressure at the office when they are paying.
After covid, many dental offices added glass panel to protect on the counter, many offices can’t reach the tablet from behind if they place the tablet on the counter.

With those findings, we decided to remove the tablet layer, and give the control back to front desk staffs.

Version 2

The V2 shifted the focus to the dashboard, which become the central hub of taking payment on-site and sending invoices off-site.

V2 Dashboard & Taking Payment On-site

V2 Patient Portal (Off-site)

Results

V2 was a huge success, our sales increased 400% in 2 months compared to the V1. Also, the feedbacks from our sales are also very positive when they show people our products.

“It’s easy to use and totally different from the traditional credit card terminals.”
Cindy, Smile Plant Dental