Toothpick

Context

Company: Toothpick
Timeframe: 2012; 6 months
Role: Freelance UX+UI designer

Around the time when Uber went international and most services, events, and accommodation had already been modernized with self-serve online booking, the healthcare industry was still relying on phone calls. This wasn’t just a convenience problem for patients but also for clinics, who were losing revenue due to busy lines and no-show appointments.

Mission

A dentist doctor and a tech entrepreneur co-founded a company set to disrupt the analog status quo, starting with the UK dental market. They cold-started a two-sided marketplace, raised capital from reputable local investors, and hired a team.

Contributions

I was brought on the project to articulate the founders’ product vision into fully functional software. Individual contributions:

• Designed the logo and visual identity,
• Laid out information architecture and optimized user journeys for conversion,
• Wrote marketing and micro-copy,
• Designed the user interface of the complete system,
• Carried out guerrilla usability testing to validate solutions,
• Convinced stakeholders to start with a responsive web app implementation (instead of a desktop website with separate iOS and Android apps).

Results

• Performance data undisclosed
• Company acquired by a larger competitor in 2015

Branding and visual identity

The logo was designed to support the company name pun by explaining the business activity visually. The typeface and color scheme followed the industry cliché for instant familiarity.

User-centered service design

The starting point was defining requirements and aligning with founders on the core aspects of user experience, such as being able to browse clinics by:

• Location proximity,
• Available services,
• Accessibility amenities,
• Ratings and reviews.

Responsive web app

Shaping the design required tight collaboration with engineers to find and validate the technical feasibility of UX+UI concepts. The first big challenge was using RWD methodology to optimize the entire front end for all device categories—at a time when HTML5 and CSS3 support was still heavily fragmented between leading browser vendors.

Leveraging cutting-edge technology

A lot of technical wizardry went into being able to show the first available appointments for multiple clinics at the same time—designed to reduce the number of back-and-forths between clinics' profile pages needed to find a suitable appointment time. Especially on smartphone devices.

This conversion optimization required solving a formidable technical challenge on the back-end, which combined Toothpick’s proprietary data with appointment availability obtained via real-time integration with leading dental clinic back-office software vendors.

Novel UX patterns

The application used phone number verification for preventing abuse, improving appointment reminders, and enabling clinics to ask patients for their phone numbers with a justified reason.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The company soon rose in prominence and accelerated its traction by enabling indexing and optimizing the app’s pages for search engines.

Credits

Development: D.Labs