Practice Pathways
Helping Young Dentists Acquire a First Practice
Background
Practice Pathways is a business unit of Zions Bancorporation that lends to dentists, veterinarians and optometrists. We were given the task to redesign the site as we migrated it to the AEM platform. We used this project as an opportunity to pilot human-centered design processes that would be replicated for other business units.
The Challenge
As we interviewed stakeholders, we discovered that the existing Practice Pathways website was not a highly-utilized resource for their customers. Instead, customers almost exclusively interfaced personally with the group’s business development officers and other staff. We also learned that younger dentists and doctors increasingly want more self-service options online. As they consider options for financing their first practice, they are generally lacking in financial knowledge and business savvy. They rely heavily on information from peers, as well as what they find online to inform their financing decisions.
From these insights, we wondered if rethinking the website as more of an educational resource would create more value for these young doctors and ultimately serve to help acquire more client relationships.
My Role
User Research, Personas, Journey Maps, Sketches, Wireframing, Prototyping
Timeline
October 2019 — February 2020
Discovery
We began our discovery phase by seeking to better understand Practice Pathways’ customers. Since we didn't have immediate access to end customers, we interviewed eleven business development officers, who work personally with loan applicants. We asked them about the different types of customers they regularly serve and the different goals and needs these customers have. We then developed proto-personas based on our findings from these interviews. We reviewed the personas with the stakeholders and further revised them based on feedback.
Proto-Personas
From the insights we gained from business stakeholders, we developed five personas:
• Chris, the Associate — A young dentist looking to acquire his first practice.
• Amy, the Expander — An established practice owner looking to expand to a new location.
• Jennifer, the Refinancer — An established veterinarian looking to get her finances in order.
• Robert, the Investor — A business-driven veteran looking to acquire his fourth practice.
• Tom, the Broker — The majority of clients acquiring practices work through brokers.
We learned from our interviews with the business development officers that young doctors looking to acquire their first practice have limited financial and business knowledge and that they increasingly want to be able to do more on their own online. Chris was modeled after this customer group and since this group seemed to have the greatest need for online resources, we made Chris the primary focus for the initial launch of the site.
Journey MapS
We gathered six people from the Practice Pathways group who regularly interact with customers and led journey mapping session with them for three different customer journeys: acquiring a first practice, setting up online payments and refinancing a loan.
We discovered quite a few problems with their application process which, as a byproduct of this project, helped them make some improvements to their overall service operation.
From Chris's journey in acquiring a first practice, the main insight seemed to be that there's a major pain point in submitting documents. Though document submission was out of scope for this launch, it seemed to further stress the importance of digital tools for Chris.
Competitors
We also analyzed sites from several of Practice Pathways’ competitors to gain insight on what customers in this industry are likely accustomed to expecting. We had a few questions going into this:
• How do other lenders provide educational resources to their customers in finance and business?
• How do they tailor their content to dentists, versus optometrists or other specialties?
• Besides an application conversion, what other user flows ought we to consider?
Ideation
As we moved on to sketching concepts, we tried to imagine the different task flows that our different personas might take as they visit the site. Chris seemed to be the one most likely to spend more time on the site, researching different things like what kinds of loans are available, rates that are offered and what the application process is like. We wanted to also be sure that every user could find content relevant to them whether they were a young dentist or an experienced veterinarian.
Initial Sketches
As we sketched the page layouts of the site, we strove to accommodate as naturally as possible the task flows we sketched earlier. We eliminated the top navigation that the previous site had and adopted instead a layout more similar to a landing page. Users could then navigate to content best suited to their specialty or their financing goal, depending on how they thought about what content was most relevant to them. Chris, could then, for example, either navigate to a page about acquiring a practice or a page catered specifically to dentists. The goal was to make it so there was not wrong way to navigate the site.
Wireframes
As we transitioned to wireframes, we carried over the flow mapped out in the sketches. A key component here is the access to educational content. Throughout the pages there would be links to helpful articles, checklists and advice. We hoped that this would keep users like Chris engaged on the site to where they develop confidence and trust in Practice Pathways.
High Fidelity
Ideally we would have wanted to test and validate the wireframes before proceeding further, but we were pressed to ship soon. We had strong support from stakeholders to move forward with the design and build out high-fidelity mockups.
We tried to help the stakeholders develop copy with educational value, rather than the technical product language that the old website had. This was to be an important component for users like Chris who want to do their research online and lack financial and business expertise.
Conclusion
While we wanted to further optimize the experience through testing and iteration, we were pulled from the project once the site launched. Some things that I hope are added in the future are better educational content, a fully digital loan application and a digital document submission system. These are some things we believe will best serve customers like Chris.
