Darby Dental App

Darby Dental is one of the top distributors of dental supplies in the United States, with more than 50,000 different products in several strategically located warehouse and distribution centers across the country.

Goals

Darby Dental wanted to redesign their existing app to improve the visibility and usability of high-value tools and add new capabilities to provide better service to their B2B customers. Darby’s app overhaul preceded and directly informed Darby's subsequent desktop redesign engagement. Working across both platforms in parallel helped to align a lot of the new features as well as reduced duplicative development efforts.

I was the senior experience designer on the project responsible for all UX and UI aspects of the redesign, and primary design contact between Usablenet and our client. My team included our PM from Usablenet, a dedicated content strategist and researcher, and an analytics/SEO lead to assist with data and metrics for analysis. We collaborated directly with the stakeholders from Darby, as well as a combined engineering team from both Usablenet and Darby.

Key research findings:

• Customers feel they are not supported in finding products. Search is an area of both high risk and big opportunity. Customers expect to be able to search by product name, product type, key words, product number, and manufacturer number. (similar to desktop)

• For existing customers, highest value areas are the Product History page and the Quick Order feature (similar to desktop)

• The Darby site is not building confidence in users

• Darby customers need a website that is a closer mirror to their preferred work-flow: ease of use, speed of use, reliability, quick access to clear decision-making information

• Customers are eager for promotion information, highlighting this as an opportunity area.

Customer quotes:
“[A] lot of products that Darby offers are not also included in their catalog book. So I can’t exactly see what it is. Like I’ve also tried looking at some of those products online, and they’re not specifically there. But they [can] be ordered. So a lot of those products, I’ve had to order blindly, and then return them if it was not the product I was looking for.”

“I notice when I’m entering – say if I’m searching something, I know with some companies where you enter the item number, it’ll go straight to that specific item, I notice that when I search that [on Darby], it gives me a variety and I have to search for that item. It’s a little more work to search for that specific item that we want or need…I already know what I want and I have to look for that item.”

The previous app had many limitations which included complex navigation patterns that buried reorder and inventory tools behind extensive taps, sparse product details, and inefficient search capabilities. Key optimizations and new features addressed:

• Intuitive flows for new Scan-to-Order and Scan-to-Inventory functionality (centerpiece of the redesign)
• Improved customer account tools like Invoice History, Reorder, Lists
• Competitive price analysis tools (quick quotes & pricing requests)
• Push notifications for order and delivery status, flash sales, promotions, etc.
• Optimized experience for both new and returning online customers
• A more contemporary look and feel for increased consumer confidence

An important new feature for Darby was the capability to use the phone’s camera to scan product bar codes to simplify maintaining inventory and ordering new supplies. I led the team in conducting competitive research and user interviews with dental office staff, supply managers, and practice owners, to better understand their day-to-day experience, and how they were using the app. Additionally, we built a very rough approximation of a supply closet, and pretended to go through the motions of searching for, and scanning physical items on shelves. This real-time, physical mapping exercise significantly helped the team understand how a customer might use the proposed new scanning feature.

Multiple technical/UX complexity considerations were uncovered during our discovery process, including:

• Integrating a device camera/barcode scanner reliably across iOS hardware

• Reconciling scanned items against a 50,000-product catalog in real time

• Designing for a practice-floor use context (gloves on, fast-paced, maybe one-handed) rather than a desk-based browsing context, very different from the desktop redesign's customer

• Potential offline/connectivity handling if scanning happens in back-office storage areas with poor signal

Early wire-flows and workshop notes

Initial sketches for active inventory functionality

Mid-fidelity sketches of inventory UI

Wireframes of "scan to inventory" flow

High-fidelity mock-ups of "scan to inventory" flow

The app launched on the App Store in Spring 2017, with the Scan-to-Inventory flow, validated through the supply-closet testing exercise and interviews with dental office staff, as its centerpiece feature. Additionally customers appreciated the new feature to directly contact a rep through the app.

The parallel work across app and desktop also meant the UX patterns and findings from this project carried forward directly into Darby's website redesign later that year. The app reached a peak App Store rating of 3.5 out of 5 while it was available.