National Dental CareLarge-scale digital transformation
Overview
National Dental Care is currently one of the largest providers of dental services in Australia, and is growing fast. This growth is fuelled by acquiring top-performing practices, investing in their ongoing training and clinical improvement, and bringing them into the NDC family. As they grow, they need a platform that would support this trajectory.
SCOPE
Brand RefreshUser ResearchPersonas & Customer JourneysUser ExperienceUser TestingUI DesignDigital Design SystemTechnology ConsultingFullstack EngineeringContent Migration
Challenge
From a digital perspective, the acquisition of each new practice brings along with it its own dedicated website, often falling short of a modern web experience. This situation posed challenges for the NDC national team as they endeavoured to manage not only their primary site, which was already on an outdated CMS and was difficult and costly to make any updates, but also numerous individual practice sites, resulting in additional complexities and decreased efficiencies.
Nightjar’s brief was to design and engineer a new platform that would consolidate the various stand alone sites into one mastersite, while still creating a consistent and cohesive brand experience. On the backend, the technical solution needed to be able to scale to handle this growth trajectory of acquiring up to 10 practices per year, while giving the NDC team full control of all the practice child-sites, as well as an easier way to maintain cybersecurity. As an additional UX and design challenge to overcome, some practices are NDC branded, West Coast practices are DB Dental branded, and recent acquisition practices needed to retain some of their own branding elements (logos, colour palettes) to be convinced to move to the new mastersite.
Solution
We created a flexible design system that accommodates NDC branded practices, as well as acquisition practices wanting to maintain elements of their own brand identity. The design is warm and friendly, while maintaining the professional tone of the NDC masterbrand.
Our UX decisions were based around user needs as uncovered in research, with people at various ends of the dental-care spectrum. We made it easy for people to book an appointment based on symptoms and problems, rather than jumping to solutions.
A hyper-customisable approach
Using Sanity as our CMS, we created shared/global pages for almost everything within the NDC umbrella (treatments, blogs, health funds, payment plans, practitioners), allowing content editors to change a global reference to a page (for example, a treatment) which will then update and roll out across all practices referencing that page, as well as inheriting the theme of the practice instantly. This saves the NDC team hundreds of hours in content updates.
Hosting on Vercel Enterprise allows us to host 80+ practices on unique domains, by leveraging Vercel edge middleware. Our modern infrastructure means we were able to improve SEO scores, hit faster page load speeds and create accessible design.
We also launched a highly responsive and performant practice search, leveraging the Google Maps API to build a custom search UI based on the user’s suburb or postcode - serving them the most relevant practices based on their location. People can also find the nearest practice offering certain treatments, health funds, offers or payment plans.
Most importantly, this robust and scalable platform supports the NDC marketing team’s needs and has reduced need for external development, and they can update content frequently and easily.
“From the very beginning, the Nightjar team took the time to understand our business and patient base, laying out a strong foundation. The design gave us something really fresh, delivered through a thoughtful and detailed process, and we were blown away by the tech solution. Nightjar created something incredibly complex but made it so flexible and easy to use. They worked tirelessly with us and the final result shows - two teams working as one, to deliver a platform that will support our business well into the future. It has been a mammoth task, and we are thrilled with the results - conversions are already enjoying a huge increase and we are saving internal hours on content updates.”