Yapi · Product experience

Making the patient experience feel more human.

Yapi helps dental practices create better patient experiences. The opportunity was to turn fragmented workflows into one clear, calm care journey.

Healthcare

Case study

Product design

B2B SaaS

Design System

Data visualization

Startup

The challenge

Dental practices were still relying on paper forms and fragmented records—making patient intake difficult to manage, search, update, and secure.

The approach

Research with office staff and patients shaped a connected, paperless workflow for the moments that matter most: intake, form creation, and ongoing record management.

The work became three integrated products: Patient Intake Forms, a flexible Form Editor, and a shared Forms Library.

What changed

01

Paperless intake and records, built for real practice workflows.

02

A flexible form system that staff can create and manage themselves.

03

A stronger, more competitive product that helped drive Yapi’s acquisition.

BRIEF

Yapi is a B2B (& B2C) SaaS startup

  • Venture funding by M33 Growth

    • later acquired by DoctorLogic

  • Automates dental offices

  • Helps front and back office staff

    • Online Scheduling

    • Online Dental Forms

    • Appointment Reminders

    • Online Reviews

    • Intra-office Messaging

    • Patient Tracking

    • Phone Integration

Research

I conducted:

  • ethnographic interviews at the dental office

  • stakeholder interviews

  • implemented Pendo to look at analytics

Insights

  • Dental offices have many forms they need filled out: 

    • Medical History, Consent forms, HIPAA, etc

    • Some offices have well over a dozen forms

  • Patient fills out paper form

  • Paper forms can get lost, misfiled, etc

  • Often errors in transcribing

  • Paper medical records are hard to deal with

    • Hard to store

    • Hard to access

    • Hard to update

    • Hard to search

    • Hard to backup

    • Susceptible to water, fire damage

Requirements gathering

  • Front office staff would love the process to be completely paperless

  • Office would love patients to fill forms out before coming in

  • Various input devices: 

    • office device: kiosk, tablet, 

    • patient’s device: desktop, tablet, mobile 

  • Needs to write into PMS (Practice Management Software)

  • HIPAA privacy requirements

    • protect PHI (Protected Health Information)

  • Needs to be updated every few years

    • would be great to have it automated

  • Lots of Spanish speaking patients

    • need translated

  • Form validation

Personas

Several personas were created

SOLUTION

3 products created:

  • Patient Intake Form - process new patients

  • Form Editor - create custom forms

  • Forms Library - manage forms

Patient Intake Form

  1. Patient handed tablet

    • Personalized

    • In office

  2. Dynamic link sent via text or email

    • Personalized

    • Outside office

    • needs authentication

  3. Static link found on office website

    • Generic

    • Outside office

Form Editor

Challenge: Customers want to create their own custom forms. Normally they would have to wait a long time for Yapi to create custom forms at an additional cost.

The Answer: Form Editor allows customers to create their own forms.

I interviewed users onsite in their dental offices to learn what elements they want in a form. Drag and drop components were created to expedite the users most common requests, and organized by type.

Prototypes were tested with actual users and several iterations were created until user, business, and technical needs were satisfied.

Form Editor: unforeseen challenge

Another challenge was that we needed to bring this to market quickly, to not lose subscribers and stay relevant in a very competitive and quickly changing dental software landscape. In order to do this, a 3rd party dev team from Ukraine was enlisted.

I provided the team detailed annotated comps. But in order to release the product quickly we had to compromise on some designs. The first iteration included the dark buttons that matched the Ukrainian teams existing components. These were updated to match Yapi’s Design System in a subsequent release.

The addition of paperless forms to Yapi resulted in retaining existing customers, gaining additional subscribers, and increasing revenue.

Forms Library

Forms Library allows users to 

  • view forms

  • sort forms

  • search by name

  • edit forms

  • add them to packages

  • translate to Spanish and German

  • see who and when modified

  • see if active

  • set recurring rule

  • see if Yapi or custom

Reflection

The addition of Patient Intake Forms, Form Editor, and Forms Library:

  • put Yapi at the forefront of the competitive landscape

  • increased revenue

  • increased subscriptions

  • made customers very happy :)

  • led to being acquired by DoctorLogic, another company in the dental technology space. 

© 2026 Peter Maziak

UX Designer & Researcher · Chicago