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client success stories
Harnessing unprecedented insights and technological advancements for better health
3 min read
Healthcare
Research, strategy and end-to-end mobile application development
With the rapid advancement of sensor and smart technology in the oral healthcare industry, connected toothbrushes have been flooding the marketplace. However, the vast majority of these products fail to provide the actionable, real-time coaching and guidance needed for lasting results
Philips Oral Healthcare, the leader in consumer oral healthcare products, wanted to create a best-in-class product that would establish a new bar for daily brushing experiences. With the success of Philips’ Sonicare for Kids connected toothbrush, there was an opportunity to merge technology with research, insights, and big data to create an adult-focused Philips Sonicare brush that maintained Philips’ stance as the #1 recommended brand by dental professionals worldwide.
Philips prides itself on its rigorous user tests to confirm and quantify the benefits of its product. Applying best practices of user research, Smashing Ideas, the design and innovation arm of Zoreza Global, created a lean, agile testing and validation plan that met the goals of Philips’ high-quality standards. Smashing aligned to a “North Star” for our collective efforts – creating a complete “dentist clean” at home, based on real-time, personalized data.
The Research & Strategy team then embarked on an unprecedented testing and validation phase over 16 months that included 255 1:1 interviews and 75 focus groups, produced 6 high-fidelity prototypes, and had 105 unique users whose daily habits were tracked and analyzed over 117 days. This allowed teams to create a product development strategy that aligns to user needs.
In order to create a stellar customer experience for users, one of the first tasks was to interview potential users and create motivational personas based on typical Sonicare users. Forming a product development strategy, Smashing & Philips’ development teams worked together to create prototypes and make them available for testing, using contextual inquiry to validate assumptions and get unbiased perspectives through surveys, interviews, and observation. This helped provide large amounts of consumer product research, as Smashing wanted to know how users actually used the prototypes in their homes and where and when problems were encountered. This product research informed application development, adjusting user flow, features, design, and how the application interacted with the toothbrush handle, delivering first-class product engagement. As a result, Smashing developed a mobile healthcare app that appeals to users.
There was an opportunity to merge technology with research, insights, and big data to create an adult-focused product that maintained Philips’ stance as the #1 recommended brand by dental professionals worldwide.
Smashing’s research plan helped create a connected customer experience that is underpinned by extensive data and user validation, resulting in an industry-leading smart toothbrush that does what it claims – enhancing product engagement by providing real-time guidance, while coaching users to clean hard-to-reach and missed areas and focused brushing techniques that are based on each user’s unique needs. Here are some of the results from intensive product research:
