The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD) is the recognized authority on children’s oral health. Its 10,000 members provide primary care and comprehensive dental specialty treatments for infants, children, adolescents, and individuals with special health care needs.
AAPD’s website was outdated, the design did not reflect the brand, and the navigation was clunky and not at all intuitive. Overall, it lacks a clear path for site visitors to follow. The AAPD’s goal was to make it easy for people to contact them and buy services and products.
The project began with an Adage Align engagement. Adage Align is a personalized combination of a discovery workshop with various stakeholders, a technology audit, and member research in the form of focus groups, surveys, and interviews.
The result is a comprehensive assessment of goals, definitions of success, and the revelation of what’s most important to members. Deliverables include developed personas, user journeys, a project roadmap and others depending on client needs.
Clickable prototypes of a new user interface design were built by Adage from the information divulged during the discover process/align engagement. The UI designs addressed stakeholder, member, and non-member requests. The new navigation is intuitive, content is easy to find, and the design is updated, fresh, and supports the AAPD’s branding guidelines.
The Adage development team built the new site with Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) CMS which easily integrated with AAPD’s association management system, ACGI. The integration allowed AAPD staff to take advantage of Optimizely’s personalization feature so that they could personalize content to users based on member information.
Optimizely DXP is also very easy to use, which allows the small marketing team at AAPD to update content without help from developers
As part of the DXC package, AAPD used Optimizely’s Search and Navigation to create a faceted search on the site with filtering for easy content findability, which had previously been a major member pain point.
Adage also developed a “Find-a-Pediatric Dentist” tool using Optimizely that enables users to quickly search for a pediatric dentist by zip code and mile radius.
