PracticeWave
Project date: 2013
My Role: UX Designer / Front-End Development
Other team members: UX Designer, Back-End Engineers (2)
Project description: In February 2013 I worked with 3 friends and former co-workers to start a company called PracticeWave. Our goal was to make it easier for dentists to run a practice and better understand their business. I was responsible for user experience, visual design, and front-end development.
The Challenge
When we started PracticeWave, our goal was to build an easy to use web-based platform for dental practice management. In 2013, most dental practices ran their practice on antiquated software that ran locally on a server in their office. For many reasons, this was expensive, slow, difficult to set up, and hard to maintain. We wanted to help dentists focus on their patients, rather than worrying about their software. Additionally, we wanted to focus on helping them build a better business by providing tools to integrate with their finance software, engage with patients, and set business goals.
My process
We were fortunate enough to have a local dental practice that was interested in partnering with us, this was extremely helpful because it allowed us to better understand our target users and their needs. After setting our initial goals, we started out by conducting some interviews with various employees within the practice. From our interviews we built 3 personas that helped inform our designs. Using our personas, we designed, prototyped, tested, and built out the first useful features of our app: Patient scheduling, charting, and a dashboard showing your practices performance against your goals.
Results
After pitching our company to investors, and even generating some interest, we ultimately decided to stop working on PracticeWave due to lack of funding.
