All work

App design · Dental health

Aligner Smile Tracker

Invisible braces only work if patients actually wear them. This app made wear time visible to both the patient and the practice.

Aligner Smile Tracker
Role

Lead UI & UX designer

Scope

Patient app + practice admin

Research

Patients and dentists

Platform

iOS & Android

Aligner Smile Tracker

The problem

The treatment fails when nobody is watching.

Invisible aligners have to be worn around 22 hours a day to move teeth. The single biggest problem dental practices reported was not the product itself. It was patients taking a brace out for lunch and forgetting to put it back until bedtime.

Nobody was being careless. The brace is invisible, the progress is invisible, and the consequence of a missed hour doesn’t show up for weeks. There was nothing in the patient’s day making any of it real. Meanwhile the practice only found out treatment had stalled at the next appointment, having already given up the chair time.

Aligner Smile Tracker screens
Aligner Smile Tracker screens

Wear tracking, reminders and the selfie gallery are the three features doing the behavioural work.

What I did

Three decisions the product hangs on.

01

Went to the patients before designing anything

I interviewed existing aligner patients alongside their dentists. The gap was clear: dentists framed it as compliance, patients framed it as forgetting. That reframe shaped the product. Nobody needed telling off; they needed a timer and a reason to care.

02

Made progress visible enough to want

A wear tracker counts hours as they happen and prompts when the brace has been out too long. On top of that, a weekly selfie prompt builds a gallery over the course of treatment, which the app turns into a progress video. That last part started as a motivation feature and turned into a marketing one. Patients share the videos, and the practice gets leads from them.

03

Designed the practice side, not just the patient side

An admin system lets a dentist monitor patients remotely, see who has stalled and message them in one tap. Streamlining that keeps chair time free and lifts how many patients a practice can carry at once. That is the commercial argument that gets an app like this funded.

Aligner Smile Tracker screen
Aligner Smile Tracker screen
Aligner Smile Tracker screen
Aligner Smile Tracker screen
Aligner Smile Tracker screen

The practice-side admin: remote monitoring, patient galleries and one-tap messaging.

Next project

Nifty Drops

Start a project

Tell me what you’re building.

Send the Figma, live product, deck or even a rough message. I’ll tell you what I think it needs, whether I’m the right fit and roughly what it’ll cost.

Usually reply within one working day · No sales call required