Business Challenge & Scope

Dentsply Sirona faced a critical need to transform its e-commerce presence and internal design capabilities. Their existing multi-website ecosystem lacked visual consistency and industry-standard UX practices, while the absence of a dedicated design team meant they struggled with inefficient workflows, visual inconsistencies between team members' work, and no standardized approach to component creation.

Additionally, the company needed strategic guidance on building internal design infrastructure to support their evolving digital presence and maintain design quality at scale.

This comprehensive design transformation initiative spanned multiple web applications and touched every aspect of the company's digital design approach. The scope included facilitating strategic workshops to establish new e-commerce direction, leading a complete visual redesign across multiple websites, and creating an entirely new design system from the ground up, all while working closely with business stakeholders, development teams, and marketing professionals to ensure technical feasibility, brand compliance, and cross-departmental adoption.

I worked on this project as a senior designer from March 2018 - February 2019.

Research & Discovery

Our team's discovery process centered on collaborative design workshops—5 cross-functional full-day sessions that I facilitated alongside 4 other Levvel designers.

These workshops revealed the company's strategic priorities for their refined e-commerce experience while uncovering underlying workflow problems that were hindering both internal efficiency and customer experience, ultimately aligning diverse stakeholders around a shared vision for the new design direction.

Proto-Personas

During our initial workshop session, I facilitated proto-persona development with the primary stakeholder and cross-functional teams to establish baseline user understanding.

Office Manager + Dental Hygienist | General + Specialist Dentist

This foundational exercise helped align the team around user-centered thinking, with plans to validate and refine these personas through subsequent research phases.

User Journey Mapping

The following two days focused on comprehensive user journey mapping sessions with all primary stakeholders present. I helped facilitate these collaborative exercises to map workflows for each key persona, recognizing that while this process can be intensive, it’s invaluable for surfacing stakeholder assumptions and uncovering unexpected user behaviors.

missing pic oops

User Journey Map | Office Manager

User Journey Map | Dental Assistant

These initial journey maps served as our research foundation, providing hypotheses that we would later validate through 25+ in-depth user interviews with participants matching our established persona profiles

Strategic Synthesis

Following the workshops, I collaborated with two design team members who led the user interviews and data synthesis, then took ownership of translating those insights into strategic deliverables for Dentsply Sirona’s leadership team. These materials would establish our design direction and guide decision-making for the remainder of the project.

For this case study, I’m focusing on the Office Manager and Dental Assistant personas, as these proved most influential in shaping the design decisions for Dentsply Sirona’s e-commerce transformation.

Office Manager

User Persona | Office Manager

Pain Points & Opportunities | Office Manager

User Journey Pt. 1 | Office Manager

User Journey Pt 2. | Office Manager

Dental Assistant

User Persona | Dental Assistant

Pain Points & Opportunities | Dental Assistant

User Journey Pt. 1 | Dental Assistant

User Journey Pt. 2 | Dental Assistant

User Flow Diagramming

The completed user personas and journey maps revealed critical pain points in the existing online store, which became my primary focus for the design solution phase.

User Flow | Purchase Experience

Implementation & Adoption Strategy

Product Mockups

Product Detail Page

Cart

Checkout

Order Confirmation

Results & Impact

The comprehensive research and design strategy work delivered significant value for Dentsply Sirona’s digital transformation initiative. Our user personas and journey mapping became foundational assets that informed product roadmap decisions and feature prioritization across multiple development teams. The design system components and documentation we established provided a scalable framework that reduced design inconsistencies and accelerated future project delivery.

Beyond immediate project deliverables, this work established Dentsply Sirona’s first systematic approach to user-centered design, creating processes and documentation that the internal teams could build upon long-term. The strategic recommendations we provided for design collaboration tools and team structure helped position the organization for more efficient design operations as they continued scaling their digital presence.

For me personally, this project validated the power of comprehensive user research in driving strategic business decisions while highlighting the critical importance of collaborative design tools—insights that directly informed my approach to subsequent design system initiatives.

Lessons Learned

Sketch and Abstract

Collaborating across 5 design files with 4 designers using Sketch and Abstract proved to be a significant workflow challenge. At the time, Sketch lacked multiplayer functionality and required Abstract to manage version control, treating design files like GitHub commits.

While conceptually sound, the Abstract-Sketch combination consistently created obstacles for our team. We frequently encountered merge conflicts that resulted in lost progress and corrupted files. Although Abstract’s interface was intuitive, its version control concepts proved difficult for non-technical designers unfamiliar with development workflows. This led me to spend considerable time mentoring junior designers on these technical concepts and troubleshooting file management issues.

This experience highlighted the critical importance of real-time collaboration tools for design teams. The workflow friction was so significant that it motivated me to advocate for Levvel’s permanent transition from Sketch to Figma, ensuring future projects would benefit from seamless multiplayer collaboration.

In Closing

My partnership with Dentsply Sirona encompassed a comprehensive UX design process, from initial research through final implementation. Collaborating with an exceptionally talented UX researcher elevated the quality and depth of our work, while also highlighting the critical importance of seamless design collaboration tools for distributed teams.

This experience—combining extensive user research, strategic design thinking, and cross-functional collaboration—set the stage for my next major challenge with Levvel: leading the design system strategy for Lineage Logistics’ LinOS platform.

If you’d like to learn more about the Dentsply Sirona project details or discuss the research methodologies and outcomes in greater depth, I’d welcome the opportunity to share more insights.