Jently Night
Guard
Elevating Oral Care,
& Improving Customer Experience
through UX Web & Service Design
Overview:
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Dental night guard case study - UX research
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A new night guard made of superior material is entering an already crowded market. The question became "How might we build smooth customer experiences that meet the users needs beginning to end, and gain the edge in the market?"
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Solution:
UX Web and Service design implementation
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My Roles:
UX Researcher | UX Designer
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Tools:
Google Suite, Hand Sketching, Figma, Shopify
The Stakeholder: Dave Mai, a dentist of over 10 years, approached The Inturnship Advertising Agency with a new type of night guard never-before seen on the market.
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His goal: to build out brand, web and service designs which take into account the needs of the users from start to finish.
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The Team: 4 Strategists, 2 Creatives, and 2 UX Designers.
My Role: UX Researcher and Designer, looking at user friendly web design AND service design.
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Length of Project: 18 weeks.
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Competitor Analysis
Website Content Analysis
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5 out of 6 competitors break down their service processes into 3 visual steps– from impression kit to receiving your night guard
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Most companies don’t offer explanations
of different night guards available
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5 out of 6 competitors offer a money back guarantee
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Average cost of a one-time night guard purchase ranges from $139-$169
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Website imagery overwhelmingly focuses on night guards and their cases
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50% of companies offered an explanation
of why one should use their product
Click to Expand
Website Flow Analysis
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4 of 6 competitor sites have a "How It Works" Page
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Most common pattern is:
Homepage– How It Works– Pricing/Product Option– Add To Cart– Checkout Page– Submit Payment
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3 of 6 companies offer night guard customization (thickness/softness)
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2 competitors offered yearly vs one-time payments
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All sites offered PayPal and Credit Card Checkout options
Competitor User Analysis
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6 users and their experiences with competitor sites and products were studied
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Users were studied by reviews left on 3rd party websites (to avoid biased reviews on
competitor sites). This included video and written reviews.
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Users' experiences were categorized as a form of affinity map, originally arranged into 3 categories (pain points, plus points, packaging experiences)
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The second round of categorization gave more specific break downs of the original 3 categories
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These categories were then formed into a breakdown of positive and negative experiences summed up here
Click to Magnify
eCommerce Platform Analysis
Since our stakeholder is new to the world of e-commerce, he asked us for recommendations of which platform would work best for his needs. Myself and the other UX team member researched this on his behalf while looking at the following criteria:
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Usability
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Scalability
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Templates
4. Cost of Platform
5. Online Transaction Fees
6. Customer Support Offered
7. Customer-Relationship Management Tools
8. Inventory Management
9. Seller Additional Benefits (Plus-ups)
We looked at all of this through the lens of a single business owner who has minimal knowledge of web design or development. The idea was to look at what would work best for someone who wanted an online one-product shop and to find the best solution for him.
Comparisons of the Top 3 platforms used by competitors
We decided upon Shopify, as it provided the greatest support for the lowest price. It was also the most customizable, giving us designers the greatest amount of flexibility in building out the web design.
User Interviews
5 Users were interviewed, ranging from 25-60 years of age (interview notes can be viewed here).
All users experienced stress and anxiety as a root of their bruxism (teeth grinding). All of them had experiences with night guards, store bought and ones made by dentists.
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Experiences with night guards ranged from 4 days to 20 years of night guard use.
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Users shared their positive and negative experiences with us around their night guard use.
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The user data was analyzed by affinity mapping.
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We then crafted two personas.
Affinity Mapping
Affinity Map- Click to Magnify
Personas
Persona 1 (Ava)
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This persona represents the older generation of interviewees, as they held remarkably similar patterns of thinking around their oral care.
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Core Insights
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Seeks her recommendations for oral care from the dentist and dental assistants.
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Sticks with tried-and-true companies, doesn't like to stray from recommendations.
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Likes to hunt down the best deals for her products.
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Is motivated by affordability, longevity and high-quality material
​Persona 2 (Sarah)
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This persona represents the younger generation of interviewees, as they held remarkably similar patterns of thinking around their oral care.
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Core Insights
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Needs a quick solution to her teeth grinding which fits her busy schedule.
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Is comfortable with online shopping for healthcare products.
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Frustrated by past experiences with painful night guards, and lack of affordable options.
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Desires a sleek and comfortable night guard.
Customer Journey Map
Looking at the data gathered from our personas, I mapped out their journey through 6 stages (with 2 steps each).
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This customer journey map focused on what the users would experience– everything physical from advertisements and the night guard product, to the emotional impact each step would have on them.
Specific consideration was given to the customer exit points– parts of the customer journey where people could exit because of pain points. Looking at those pain points, we offered potential recommendations to remedy those pain points.
Site Map
The site map was then created from the customer journey map, noting all we could anticipate the user would need. It was also informed from our research of competitors sites and the traps that users experienced from their websites.
The Site map above is the updated version, which occured after testing wireframes (shown below in the next section).
Wireframes
From the Site map, I visualized how the website could look. At this point, special focus was given to the divergences in the mobile vs desktop versions, with a look at how "the 3 steps" for getting one's night guard would look on mobile.
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As having 3 side-by-side images with text would shift into 3 scrollable 'image + text' in mobile, I opted to make it a carousel in mobile to retain the relationship of horizontal display, thus keeping the storytelling of all three elements similar to the intended experience for desktop.
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User testing was completed on the wireframes, which led to an adjustment in the site map, as we discovered some gaps in the user experience we had anticipated. (see the 2nd image of site maps above)
HiFi Designs + User Testing
Website Tested/Samples of HiFi Design
As we were building out the website on Shopify due to the absence of a front end developer, we tested the site on the actual site itself, building out our HiFi designs in the Shopify platform.
Homepage
About Us
How It Works
Care + Maintenance Page
These are samples of some of the screens built out for our client. This work is a combination of UX ingenuity and beautiful art direction, as well as branding and copy.
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Working together with so many teams and continuous conversational flow with our stakeholders made this work launch into something deeply satisfying to all parties involved
User Feedback came in clearly, and the actionable items can be seen in the above spreadsheet. These were separated by priorities
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Most changes were minor, like adding numbers to the how to section in the home page. Other issues were greater, like removing the How It Works page from the visible flow online. Instead, we included a QR code in the Impressions kit that users would receive. From there they can learn how to make the dental impressions, etc.
Further Thoughts
This project was an amazing project to be a part of. Working with copywriters, UX designers, Strategy and Creatives, the cross collaboration and open sharing of ideas, the receptivity to the users' needs by the other team– unlike anything I have yet to encounter.
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This project went off so smoothly, I only wish that we had further time to do a final round of tests to see the changes made to the site post finality.