Tiny Tooth: User Experience Design of a Child-focused Oral Health Education Application

As demands for prevention and self-management of digital health care is increasing, health care applications have covered various domains. Yet, current child-focused oral health education applications in Korea lacked emphasis on user experience. In this paper, we propose, Tiny Tooth, a smartphone application of child-focused oral health education for parent users. We surveyed and interviewed 30 parents to find out how they learn and care for the oral health of their children. As a result, one of our main concepts is that the Tiny Tooth application would allow parent users to manage and receive information on their children’s oral health. Additionally, this application also would manage multiple children’s profiles and provide individualized dental health information. Based on our initial design concepts, we conducted Closed Card Sorting with a pediatric dentist. After the sorting, we created a site map and wireframes. Then, we created a low-fidelity prototype of the Tiny Tooth Application. Also we conducted usability testing with six parents in order to examine how easily users learn the system. Our usability testing utilized Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb and Garrett’s framework. From the usability testing, the “Credible” category received the lowest point since we did not implement a fully working search function in the low-fidelity prototype. Also ambiguous or repeated menus confused some participants. We suggest that conducting Card Sorting with multiple stakeholders would strengthen the functionality of our system. Furthermore, more clearly defined higher menus would allow users to predict what submenus follow. We expect that our user experience design process for the Tiny Tooth smart phone application could be used by oral health educators, designers, or other stakeholders for prototyping oral health education applications.