OrthoFi

May 10

Designing a Seamless User Experience So Orthodontists Can Focus on Providing Quality Care

Engagement Overview

OrthoFi is a full-service patient acquisition and insurance management platform for orthodontists, by orthodontists. Their end-to-end solution streamlines back-office logistics (like patient onboarding and managing insurance, patient billing, and collections) so orthodontic practices can focus on growth and delivering high-quality treatment.

Following a merger, OrthoFi engaged the Crafted team’s help to deprecate a monolithic legacy system and consolidate various disparate user journeys so that they could offer a modular suite of products. From designing a platform that met the needs of many different user profiles to understanding the importance of safeguarding patient confidentiality, read on to learn how Crafted drove user and business value for the OrthoFi team.

Challenges

Like many other healthtech companies, three of OrthoFi’s biggest challenges were servicing different user personas, prioritizing privacy and patient confidentiality, and integrating with third party platforms. For starters, everyone from orthodontists to front desk managers all needed to use the same platform and had to input different, valuable information. Second, as a medical platform, OrthoFi needed to ensure that their technology was HIPAA compliant so that patient health information (PHI) could only be accessed by authorized parties. Lastly, by nature, medical platforms need to interact and communicate with a lot of other platforms, such as insurance platforms and native management systems for patient interactions or documentation.

There were other challenges unique to OrthoFi at the time, largely due to their recent merger. Between joining forces with another company and continuing to add various features over time, OrthoFi found themselves with legacy technology and a lack of any singular consistent design system, which was creating an inconsistent user interface (UI) across the platform. The company they merged with also had a different product structure, where customers could pick and choose what features they wanted. The OrthoFi platform needed to be reformatted to match this system and address UI inconsistencies, all without removing any existing functionality or interrupting the user’s daily interactions.

Goals

The Crafted team came on to assist OrthoFi in breaking down their existing platform so that they could offer a modular suite of products. They wanted to build out an ideal future state that best suited their new direction and brought all offered features together seamlessly.

Technical: Create a framework that allows for modularization of the current system while also accounting for future scalability.
Design: Implement a consistent UI/UX experience for any combination of modules to create a seamless user experience.
Enablement/Training: Work with their existing design team to identify patterns throughout the platform and start defining components and building a design system.

Approach

The biggest focus of Crafted’s engagement with OrthoFi was the information architecture. We needed to reformat the navigation to be less of a maze as well as pull in some new features from the merged company.

Mapped out user journey across the existing platform

Identified all pages where dependencies were
Started isolating modular pieces so that they could operate independently

Conducted user testing to design intuitive navigation structure

Tested three levels of static navigation with additional levels within certain pages, so different personas could choose what to engage with
We learned collapsing everything into accordions made users feel like we were hiding information from them
After several iterations, landed on a floating card structure that had all high level info visible at a glance and felt intuitive to users we tested with

Constant communication/collaboration with OrthoFi designers

Ensured our new structures and patterns aligned with their existing work
Everything from the insurance portal to dashboards needed to have the same look and feel

The secondary focus of the engagement was building out a design system.

Internal OrthoFi design team owned most of the componentization and branding pieces (colors, buttons, fonts, etc.)
Crafted designers worked to identify patterns for bringing old pages in alignment with a newer look

Didn’t change the overall structure or introduce too much scope
Identified how to apply better page hierarchy (when to use tabs to separate information vs. cards, when to showcase information in a table vs. a more simplified format, etc.)

By doing these in tandem, we were able to build out the new modularization and updated pages using consistent components and stylization for streamlined development and improved user experiences

Outcomes

We helped OrthoFi achieve their ultimate goal of unifying the user experience by modernizing the front-end of their platform to deliver a modularized product suite. Through Crafted’s work, the OrthoFi team was able to…

Harness the efficiencies of a Balanced Team through leveraging lean-agile best practices like discovery and framing, which helped get software out the door faster
Build out foundational elements like reusable design components in a design library to expedite delivery and increase future development velocity
Decrease risks and set dependent teams (like sales) up for success to hit Q4 goals despite tight roadmaps and limited resources

What the OrthoFi Team Had to Say

“Crafted helped our team focus on the metrics that mattered to our product initiative. We zoned in on our key stakeholders’ most important problems to solve and leveraged the wide array of tools in the Crafted toolbox to elicit requirements and apply customer-centric design as we moved toward the solution. I also appreciated their perspective on the important collaboration between Product Managers and Product Designers, and believe we came away a stronger team because of it.”

— John Truchel, Former VP Product

“Crafted’s approach to finding answers to difficult questions is what stuck with us the most. Whether it was “Who are my stakeholders?” or “What really is my user’s problem?”, Crafted had a way to find the answer. It usually involved sticky notes and a whiteboard, but at the end of our research period, we were completely prepared to move on to framing our solutions.”

— Shelby Kelly, Product Manager | OrthoFi

Conclusion

Our work with OrthoFi is a perfect example of both our ability to ship high-value, quality products fast as well as our enablement practices. Not only did we help OrthoFi deprecate a monolithic legacy system and migrate their platform to leaner microservices, but we also introduced the team to methods such as collecting user feedback, constant prioritization, and small iterations. We take the time to understand the needs of our clients and fully integrate with their team, which drives real value for their users and their business.

“Not only was the Crafted team a complete pleasure to work with, but they also had the perfect mix of professionalism and friendliness that made them feel like a true part of the team. We are grateful (as are our users) for their help in getting us onto a small, iterative, development lifecycle, but will also miss Crafted’s day-to-day presence in our office!”