Designing at DentalQore
I walked new and continuing clients through a customized design process to meet their specific marketing needs. In collaborating with medical professionals, I was able to empathize with their marketing pain points and turn around to present them with a custom brand identity.
New clients often struggled to communicate with previously used marketing companies and would come to us for better numbers of incoming patients with SEO as well as a change in how they presented themselves online. Often they would describe their previous sites as being ‘sterile’, ‘unfriendly’, and unorganized. They sought personalized, welcoming websites that reflected their warm staff members and their professional physical office.
Existing clients I worked with sought to keep up with design trends in order to improve accessibility and sometimes this meant making only a few tweaks to increase traffic to the site and keep it pleasing to navigate through.
In the end, we have similar goals: get patients where they need to go and inform them in an efficient manner through the medium of a website.
Approaching my questions and defining the client’s through that goal bridges the gap in our industries and promotes empathetic collaboration with the design process. When giving a client an open-ended question about what they would like their new site would look like, the descriptive language is often subjective (sleek, modern, clean, ‘wow-factor, pop, fun, etc.). By following up with asking if they have any examples helps bring us back to the same page.
My progression as a designer with DentalQore has grown through many instances of communicating and understanding our developers’ needs and adapting my process to fit DentalQore’s conventions. Moving from one-on-one interactions with clients to internal back and forth with developers, meant I needed to shift my goals. From talking about an ideal product to the technical requirements, I needed to hand over a design that eliminated as many assumptions as possible.
My information architecture courses helped me design in the browser when communicating with our developers. When performing QA tasks, I could ensure we were using the same language to troubleshoot any front-end issues and have confidence in the end product we present to our clients.