My Invisalign
My Invisalign is an aligner tracking experience designed for Apple Watch and mobile devices. It incorporates fun, gamified elements to motivate patients to maintain consistent wearing habits and overcome laziness. This solution addresses key concerns for Invisalign patients, ensures optimal adherence to treatment plans, and helps improve orthodontic outcomes.
duration
3 Months
Jul - Oct 2023
type
Gamification
Wearable App
Personal Project
my role
Defining Problem
User Research
Feature Scoping
User Flow & Journey
Wireframing
Prototyping
tools
Figma
Dovetail
industry
Health Tech
Product Demo
WatchOS
React Native
Key Features
Gamified Challenges
→ Providing daily and long-term challenges to encourage adherence to users’ Invisalign wear-time goals.
→ Awarding “smiles” to fuel motivation through a sense of accomplishment and friendly competition.
Real-time Tracking
→ Offering a visual dashboard displaying the daily wear-time and overall treatment progress to keep users informed and motivated.
→ Facilitating a supportive community through progress comparison and sharing features to foster motivation.
Instant Wearable Reminders
→ Providing timely reminders through the Apple Watch, helping users to adhere to their wear schedule.
→ Customizable reminder settings ensure that reminders fit into individual daily routines without becoming a nuisance.
Context
Research
User interviews validated my hypothesis.
I conducted semi-structured user interviews with 5 aligner patients by asking them to go through their Invisalign journey. I learned about their experiences with clinics and found that treatment progress is mainly affected by limited orthodontist visits and inconsistent wearing schedules.
“I sometimes just wear the aligners at night, though I was supposed to wear them 22 hours a day.”
“I find them uncomfortable during the day, especially when I'm at work or out with friends. It's just easier to leave them out until bedtime.”
"I was really diligent at first, but after seeing some improvement, I got complacent and started wearing them less and less."
Current User Journey
To better understand the user journey and the scope of this project, I mapped the treatment process for patients and clinics.
Due to the problem space, I decided to focus on the patient’s journey during the wearing stage.
Thus, I asked
How might we help patients stay motivated throughout their treatment process?
Breaking down the problem:
User Needs
Challenge
Struggle to keep up with the wearing hours.
How might we help patients overcome laziness and develop better aligner-wearing habits?
Feel confused about my treatment progress.
How might we present real-time data in a clear, easily understandable manner for users?
Often forget about wearing schedule.
How might we provide intuitive and timely reminders that assist users in managing their wear schedule?
Design Principles
Diving deep into the problem space, I devised 3 design principles that respond to user needs and their corresponding challenges.
Delight
Motivate adherence through engaging and rewarding interactions
Clarity
Enhance understanding by clear, real-time progress visualization
Guidance
Support wear schedule management through timely and intuitive reminders
Feature Brainstorming
By auditing the features of apps that focus on habit forming, I discovered the wide use and effectiveness of gamification.
I also noticed the wide use of wearable devices, which inspired me to incorporate watchOS solution in my design.
➔ Check out the competitor benchmarking
Gamification Framework
Inspired by the Nudge Theory, I created gamification strategies aim at enhancing Invisalign wear commitment.
Research shows that patients have difficulty staying committed to their Invisalign schedule, because the existing app does not provide a motivation trigger. This reminds me of the Nudge Theory, a concept from behavioral science suggesting that small alterations in choice presentation can predictably influence decisions and behaviors.
In response, I created a gamification strategy inspired by the Nudge Theory to facilitate changes in wearing habits. This framework serves as a foundation for generating design ideas and features.
User Flow
How can a patient stay motivated with the app?
Based on the features I explored, I further developed user flows to solve the motivation challenges.
↓ Scroll to view all flows
After validation with the users, I decided to focus on the real-time tracking and reward features.
These two features stood out - all users found them helpful, so I created more detailed flows with low-fidelity wireframes.
The watch flow is developed upon the real-time tracking feature, because it is easier for taking actions like start and pause tracking.
Mobile devices are better for more detailed visualization and information, so I focused on the reward feature by showing users multiple ways to earn and redeem the “smiles.”
Key Iterations
1
I changed the progress bar from a line to circular to resemble users’ interaction with the digital crown on the Apple Watch.
Linear
Circular
2
I created two options for the mobile app design and showed them to users. 7 out of 10 reflected their preference towards the second version.
Option 1: bold blue that highlights the technical aspect
Option 2: Invisalign’s brand color
The brand color would foster a sense of connection between the app and the patients' overall experience with Invisalign.
3
I changed the mobile app's home card from rewards to wearing progress, so user can access progress tracking on the mobile end.
with bold blue that highlights the technical aspect
with the blue of Invisalign’s brand color
Solution
Quick and accessible goal-setting
Based on user feedback that the goal-setting process requires too many clicks, I simplified the process with an easy start page and made goal-setting more efficient and accessible for small screens by changing manually clicking to wheel scrolling.
From timer to countdown
To create a sense of accomplishment, I changed the timer system that other tracking apps use to countdown, which can make patients feel like “clearing out” their tasks of the day.
They can also track pause time to obtain a better understanding of both their wearing and non-wearing schedules.
Rewards that motivate
I designed a reward system called “Smiles,” a token for patients to achieve goals. Users can use Smiles to redeem gift cards to stay motivated.
A powerful mobile app
Patients can connect their watch to the phone app to sync the wear schedules. The app serves as a patient community where patients can initiate wearing competition to keep each other accountable, redeem points and gift cards to stay motivated, and monitor their activities regularly.
User Testing
I measured users’ satisfaction and task completion rate.
I asked 12 users to click through the prototype and rate their satisfaction level on a scale of 1 to 5.
➔ The satisfaction rate is measured by the percentage of users who rated 4 or 5.
➔ The task completion rate is measured by the percentage of user who completed the flow successfully.
Satisfaction rate
Task completion
Brand Proposition
My solution aims to help Invisalign patients complete treatment on schedule and increase Invisalign brand dependency on clinics.
Style Guide
I created a visual style guide to ensure design consistency.
To ensure readability for a diverse age group of Invisalign patients, I created a color system based on Invisalign's brand guidelines, using varying hues to achieve high contrast.
I followed Apple's system guidelines, using SF Pro for iOS app and SF Compact for the watch to enhance readability, especially on the smaller Apple Watch screen. The SF font family also adds a touch of urban, tech-savvy charm.
Text and icons are used as prompts to guide users for navigation. I used rounded buttons to make call-to-actions more accessible on watch screens. To minimize confusion, I stylized buttons by highlighting them in an obvious way.
Future Steps
Define success metrics to measure business impact.
If I had more time, I would conduct more research on the business impact of on-time treatment on clinics and Invisalign overall. At the current stage, I focused mainly on patients’ satisfaction level.
Universal design for different brands.
During user research, I realized patients would take various factors into consideration while deciding the aligner brand they are going to wear.
Enable remote orthodontic visits.
I discovered that patients face different incidents that hinder their regular visits. I did some research in this area, but found that there are technical difficulties that requires specialized knowledge. I would love to explore more about this direction in the future.