Straumann is a Swiss dental implant company that provides dental solutions to restore and replace missing teeth. They offer a wide range of implant products and services for dental professionals.

Over the span of seven months, I acted as the only product designer in the team building the e-commerce platform. Even in its MVP form, it already accounts for a lot of sales, but the ambition is to improve on that number. Providing core functionality and basic usability were the main pillars of this vision, and my responsibility.

For example, members of the dental team explore the catalogue at a slower pace and value clear categorisation. These types of users would start their buying journey at the Category Overview, and narrow down to the Base Product Page to select the component they need.

In comparison, both internal and external sales teams require precise search and quick bulk buying to place larger orders. For them, the buying journey could be as short as typing the products’ SKUs in quick order and adding to cart.

Technical complexity

Working in the context of agile product development, I had to provide solutions that bring a meaningful UX improvement, but are also technically feasible within the outlined roadmap.

Basically, as much as I wanted to introduce new elements and behaviours, I also had to streamline the old ones. And so I did.

Aesthetic complexity

Another complexity that I had to encounter was of aesthetic kind. More often than not, I had to embrace this one, rather than reduce it. In my work I found that, sometimes, good UX comes at a sacrifice in visual appearance.

An example of this was my adjustments of the Base Product Page. On this page the user decides on the properties of the product they want to add to cart – for example, endosteal length or width.

It was Important to nail this part of the buying flow, because the addition of PDP’s was a part of a huge update, improving the SEO of the platform, but also providing that extra product specifications to users that needed it the most.

Given that we didn’t want to break the quick buying flow for Sales reps and Providers, scanable product properties and ‘Add to cart’ CTAs had to stay intact. And, since the filters and overall layout of the page were already implemented, I had a limited space to work in. Resolving this issue was simple, but not the most visually pleasing – adding the titles to product variants.

The result was a success – it showed no confusion during tests, and to this day demonstrates a good click-through rate and high interaction on the heat maps.