Global Dashboard – Centralized Daily Overview for Sleep Dentists
CLIENT
Nierman Practice Management – company providing education for sleep dentists and developing software for easy managing sleep dental practices in the US. 2500+ users by 2025. https://niermanpm.com/
problem
DentalWriter Plus clients needed a centralized dashboard that provides at-a-glance visibility of the most important tasks and events for the current day, as well as analytics over different time periods to support actionable insights for their practices.
My Role
Research, moqups, usability tests, html/css, vector graphics, project management.
The aim was to design a global dashboard where dental practice specialists, across different roles, could start their day by quickly understanding their schedule, tasks, and priorities, and at the end of the day review statistics to assess productivity, compare with other periods, and gain actionable insights for improvement. The dashboard should function like a well-run morning huddle—the most important 10–15 minutes of the day.
01. Research
To understand what should be displayed on the dashboard I have gathered information from different resources:
- interviews with Customer Support team, Sales team, several loyal clients;
- articles about management of sleep dental practices;
- services that are providing analytics, metrics and reporting tools to be integrated into the existing practice software;
- benchmarking with Hubspot dashboard features.
As a result I had a first list of what is important and what most of the dentists are waiting to find on their dashboard and how they would like to utilize it.
- Patients visits planned for today with statistics.
- Urgent and upcoming tasks.
- Next steps (follow-ups) for the examined patients.
- Comparison with the previous day results.
- KPIs to track the performance of various areas of the business, finances, patient satisfaction.
- Role-based dashboard (especially for the financial statistics).
- Create/edit/customize dashboard.
- Get different reports based on dashboard statistics.
- AI-assistant chat.
To choose which KPI metrics to reflect on the dashboard in the first iteration I have placed a a survey on the website. All metrics were divided into 3 groups for lower cognitive load for the user: financial, operational and patient-oriented.
02. Wireframing
Thinking about what dashboard should look like I had in my mind 2 groups of users that will be utilizing this dashboard: dentists themselves, focusing on patients and clinical tasks, and office managers, focusing on scheduling and reporting. So dashboard had to serve both roles at the same time. Also financial statistics was considered sensitive and should not be displayed without the practice owner’s explicit permission.
There were several different variants of how dashboard should look like and what should be displayed.
03. Implementation
I split the dashboard into two tabs: Overview and Charts. The idea behind this decision was to avoid excessive scrolling and mixing different types of information on a single screen. Statistics were moved to the second tab since they do not need to be checked frequently during the day. This also reduced cognitive load and optimized system performance by loading and updating charts only when requested.
If there are several providers in the dental practice appears a role-based dropdown for every provider to see his own dashboard.
The Recent Patients section displays the last four admitted patients with a short summary of their visit and the next step in the patient flow. First-time visitors are highlighted. At the bottom, a ratio of new to existing patients for the day is shown.
The Upcoming Appointments section displays the six nearest appointments, including the patient’s photo, name, type of visit, and room. At the bottom, there is a statistic on past appointments. A link opens the full scheduler for the current day in a separate tab.
The Upcoming Tasks section displays six tasks with the nearest due dates. The most urgent tasks due today are highlighted in red. If there are no tasks for today, the next most relevant task is shown.
The first block contains analytical charts without customization options yet, but with the ability to change the reporting period using a date range dropdown.
04. Plans
Since we use the agile methodology for delivering work to production, this was the first deployed part, with a number of tasks prepared for implementation in the next sprints:
- create separate tab in Options with ability to customize dashboard view for every user;
- ability to create and edit charts;
- add more KPIs;
- add filters to the dashboard;
- embed external content to the dashboard;
- embed internal content from the DentalWriter Plus website.
Azizova Tamara 