Walker Dental Group is a dental practice in Macon, GA.
I was hired as a freelance Web Designer to redesign their old website to improve its visual design & usability.
Dr. Walker’s previous website had last been redesigned in 2014 and was lagging behind.
Apart from its dated visual design, Walker Dental’s previous website had no clear call-to-action (CTA, ex: Call Now, Schedule Appointment) and poor mobile responsiveness.
Lead Designer
Amy Borgstrom
Robin Newbern
Alex Wong
Shohel Hossain
Dr. Ash Walker
Jill Clay
This project began by meeting with the owner, Dr. Walker, to get a foundational understanding of their goals, their pain points, and business model.
I began user research by first interviewing Dr. Walker and the staff (hygienists, assistants, and front office) to create an empathy map of their average customer.
An empathy map was then created to draft a customer persona and create targeted, yet open-ended, questions with the goal of collecting data about what was most important to patients: caring staff, cleanliness, and minimizing their pain.
This qualitative research exercise helped us uncover 3 key insights about the industry:
Patients want to work with a dentist and staff that truly care about their wellbeing and comfort
Especially after COVID, patients expect hygienic and well organized offices to get their dental work done
Whether it’s a physically painful cavity or someone wanting a whiter smile, patients want to feel better
After researching the needs of Dr. Walker’s patients, I began the design phase with a sitemap to plan out the structure of the website.
Starting with paper sketches and lo-fi digital mockups on Figma, I then wireframed the main pages of the website to explore different layouts and components.
During this stage, Amy Borgstom and I collaborated on revising Walker Dental Group’s visual branding and logo.
Along with the wireframes, I created a stylesheet to have consistent headline structures and responsive buttons that I would use on the desktop & mobile prototypes. Using Figma, I designed a hi-fi prototype with Dr. Walker’s new brand color scheme, typography, & logo.
Once the prototype was functional, I conducted informal usability tests with family and friends to observe how they would navigate the pages and see which components they attempted to interact with or not. I made improvements to the design after observing elements that did and/or didn’t receive interactions from the tests.
The next phase of the project was taking the design of Walker Dental Group’s new site into development on my preferred builder: Webflow.
I began with creating the Navigation, Footer, and Button components on a stylesheet that also included all the Headline styles. This made creating the rest of the pages on the site more efficient and consistent.
After developing all the pages and components on the new site, I applied sizing rules to each element for it to be responsive to different screen sizes.
Once the website was fully developed on Webflow, I organized usability testing with 8 people to observe any unexpected behaviors or bugs.
After making refinements to the site, we connected the domain and officially launched the newly designed website for Walker Dental Group.
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