Darby Dental Desktop Redesign

Usablenet was engaged by Darby Dental, one of the largest dental supply distributors in the U.S., to lead a complete redesign of their B2B desktop e-commerce site, serving both prospect and returning customers.

Their previous site was called “buggy” and “confusing” for customers, requiring many of what their users called “work-arounds,” which ultimately drove increasing support/call-center costs. Additionally, Darby felt that they were losing customers to competitors who they perceived to have a better customer experience.

For this project, I was the Senior Designer reporting to the User Experience Team Lead. My team consisted of a dedicated content strategist and a UX researcher, our own Product Manager, and Usablenet’s co-located engineering team. Together we worked directly with Darby’s product leadership and development team. The desktop effort lasted roughly 14 months, in parallel with the Darby App project.

Customers wanted a more visual experience that highlighted relevant product content. Current site-wide issues were limiting users’ access to the range of products Darby offered. Darby's desktop site had accumulated years of ad hoc additions, resulting in:

• Unstructured, disorganized content and distracting, cognitively taxing homepage elements

• Difficult category-based navigation that caused customers to abandon the site, turning instead to the print catalog, their sales rep, or competitor sites

• A Product History page (one of the highest-value tools for returning customers) that underperformed comparable tools on competitor sites

• Additional considerations that added complexity to the work included a legacy tech stack, a need to integrate with the separate Darby mobile app (multi-channel data), and existing sales rep workflows that had to stay intact.

We ran a structured discovery phase before any design work began.

• Stakeholder interviews: we primarily spoke with product leadership and sales reps and learned about their issues regarding customers’ frustrations with not finding what they were looking for, as well as reps own challenges not being able to use the website as easily as they would like.
  One strong verbatim from our interviews: “…transform the website so that it supports new and existing customers in their relationship with Darby, and establish the website as a viable revenue-generating channel over time.”

• User interviews/user testing: we conducted 10 interviews with a mix of office staff and practice owners, and asked them to walk though the process of updating inventory and searching for new products. We heard, and saw firsthand, similar issues with site search, navigation, as well as order tracking and inventory management.

  • From our in-depth heuristic analysis the following ratings provided clear areas for improvement:

    • Overall heuristic usability score: poor (81/200)

    • Visual design (9/30)

    • Persuasive design (7/35)

    • Homepage content structure (1/4)

• Market/competitive research: we reviewed competitor sites from Benco Dental, Henry Schein, and Patterson Dental. One key insight was that Darby’s current product history screen did not support customers as well as the same screen/experience on competitor sites. Competitor sites provided more details, and functionality to update and reorder.

Key Research Findings

• Search as highest-risk/highest-opportunity area, with the specific finding that exact product-number searches failed and drove customers to competitor sites (Patterson, Schein)

• Product History and Quick Order as the two highest-value tools for returning customers, both underdelivering (Quick Order's 10-line cap forcing repeated submissions)

• Customers bypassing the homepage entirely, going straight to login, counterintuitive and worth a line

• Sales reps currently compensating for site gaps

From this research, we defined clear design priorities and recommendations:

Priority areas for improvement

• Design flows optimized for both prospective and returning customers

• Build confidence through a more contemporary look and feel, especially on the homepage

• Improve usability of high-value tools: Search Results, Product Listing, Product History, Quick Order, Promotions

• Improve integration with the Darby App: search, inventory management, re-orders

Supporting recommendations

• High-powered search to help customers reach target products quickly

• Explore feasibility of direct rep-to-customer communication on the site

• Refresh site content, particularly product imagery and descriptive copy

We then moved through sketching, wireframing, high-fidelity mockups, and prototypes for user testing, culminating in final assets and a style guide for development handoff.

Key improvements for the new homepage:

• Contemporary look and feel
• Highly visual presentation of products
• Cleaner and more efficient global navigation, header and footer
• Increased visibility and access: Search, Quick Order, Promotions, "Ask An Expert": hub of communication with Darby
• New image gallery: ideal for paid promotions, Darby announcements, etc.
• New mini-dashboard provides users with a snapshot of timely account-related alerts and reminders: Last Order Status, New Promotions, Multi-channel (App) data integration
• The mini-dashboard links to an upgraded My Account page (“My Darby Dashboard”) which provides access to all of the users account information and tools on a single screen.

New search results (PLP) screen re-designed for better usability:
• Visual search results improve recognition of products and ease of access
• Layered navigation, contextual filtering and sorting support search and product discovery
• Contextual advertising placements
• Higher visibility for sale/promotional products

An important insight during user testing was that customers valued the additional information on the Product History page, but identified certain aspects that could be improved to better support their work, including:

• Extending period of time that can be viewed on the Product History page to include access to as many ordered products as possible
• Ability to view product history for different time ranges such as the most recent order, one month, six months, or a year
• Identify items in the product history that currently are part of a promotion
• Add page-level search capability
• Add price

Darby’s redesigned responsive website successfully launched late Spring of 2017. Feedback from Darby and the product leadership team was extremely positive. Initial indicators pointed towards a reduction of calls in to customer service, and feedback from client reps that customers appreciated the improved search capabilities, the more-detailed order history screen, and the de-cluttered homepage.