Danish people enjoy free healthcare, but this does not include dental care, except for students. Dentistry in Denmark is generally expensive, therefore not everyone can afford it. Those who cannot, avoid regular check-ups at the dentist, leading them to develop various dental complications and diseases.

Hungary is in the top 3 cheapest countries when it comes to the price of dental procedures, making it a popular dental tourism destination. Besides dental care, accommodation and travel expenses to Hungary are also fairly cheap.

These circumstances would allow those Danes who can’t afford their dental treatment in Denmark to get the care they need and save a significant amount of money. So why don’t they do so?

My goal was to find answers to this question and develop a solution for the Hungarian dental clinic Happy-Dent, which wanted to fill this gap in the market by offering treatment to foreign patients.

Research, research & more research

The complexity of the problem required me to dig deep and discover the reason that prevents Danish people from getting the care that they need.

First, I needed to gain a thorough understanding of the problem area, more specifically the field of dental tourism and the state of Danes’ dental health by concluding broad research on these subjects. Here are key data points I found:

40%

of the population suffers from gum infection, known as periodontitis

12-14%

of Danes are treated for gum infection

Of course, in order to get to the core of the problem, I had to involve the user group and ask questions directly from them. I prepared an interview guide that contained questions about general dental habits & attitudes, and experience with & opinions about medical/dental tourism.

After conducting interviews, I was left with a large volume of data that I needed to analyze. The method I chose for this is called thematic analysis, and it required me to inspect the interview transcripts and identify common themes among them.

I found the following patterns that emerged across the interviews:

Concerns about the price of dental care in Denmark
Distrust in Danish dental healthcare
Opinions about other countries’ dental healthcare
Main concerns about dental toursim

Since I was using Design Thinking to develop the solution, I also decided to create an empathy map using the data from the interviews, so that I could better empathize with the people I am designing for.

The interviewees voiced their concerns about the logistics of dental tourism, worrying about the distance, the time that needs to be taken off from their schedules and whether the dentist can finish the treatment in the short amount of time users can stay abroad.

Another concern that was brought up is the difficulty of organizing a trip in a foreign country. It was also brought up by interviewees that traveling abroad for a dental appointment is/would be more attractive for them if it was combined with some kind of holiday.

How might we?

In the next portion of the project, my task was to translate the various findings from my research into tangible design ideas and solutions. To achieve this, I applied the Point of View method, where I used insights I learned about the users to define needs.

POV template created from insights about users

Next, I took the statements from the POV template, and converted them into actionable ‘How might we’ questions.

How might we...

address the most popular concerns about travelling and dental tourism in a reassuring way?

assure the users about the qualifications of the medical staff?

convince users that dental tourism in Hungary is a financially worthy decision?

communicate to users that they will get help with organizing a trip to Hungary?

This was followed up with brainstorming where my aim was to come up with and explore solutions for users’ needs. With rapid brainstorming, I generated a lot of ideas that needed to be categorized in a logical way. For this, I asked whether each idea can be translated into a ‘need to have’ or ‘nice to have’ feature.

Prototype: Designing the product

It was now time to organize and prioritize the content and create an information architecture. For this, I used the ideas that I categorized previously.

The landing page is the location that users start their journey on, therefore I included a lot of snippets of content that they can further explore on other pages. My intention was to gradually inform users about the specifics of dental tourism, starting with explaining what the term means and then going into more and more detail about the different aspects of a dental vacation.

Wireframes of the landing, booking and FAQ pages

In the UI design, I applied established design patterns such as carousels, accordions, and sub-navigation elements that users are familiar with. This can reduce the cognitive load that users might experience when interacting with new products.

High-fidelity mockups

Think aloud tests

For the testing of my designs, I chose the Think Aloud method. I prepared tasks that the users were asked to solve during testing sessions.

I then analyzed the results of the tests with the Instant Data Analysis method, where I categorized the issues based on severity. By doing this, I ensured that the most severe issues are prioritized during the bug fixing.

Final thoughts & conclusion

This project was the semester exam in the second year of my multimedia design education. Since it was an exam project, the project did not get deployed, however, I received the highest grade (12) on the Danish 7-point grading scale for my efforts.

In this project, I gained hands-on experience using Design Thinking as a development method. I really enjoyed taking a highly user-centered approach where I involved users in every step of the process.

The product was hand-coded by me and my team, using HTML, SASS, and JavaScript as development technologies.