Business Design Strategy
Consumer Products
The Ask
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 product that maintained Philips’ stance as the #1 recommended brand by dental professionals worldwide.
Our Research & Strategy team embarked on an unprecedented testing and validation phase over 16 months.
The Actualization
Philips prides itself on it rigorous user tests to confirm and quantify the benefits of its product. Applying best practices of user research, we created a lean, agile testing and validation plan that met the goals of Philips’ high quality standards. We aligned to a “North Star” for our collective efforts – creating a complete ‘dentist clean’ at home, based on real-time, personalized data. Our 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.
One of the first tasks was to interview potential users and create motivational personas based on the typical Sonicare users. As our development teams worked together to create prototypes and make them available for testing, we used contextual inquiry to validate assumptions and get unbiased perspectives through surveys, interviews, and observation. We wanted to know how users actually used the prototypes in their homes and where and when problems were encountered. This invaluable data informed how we adjusted user flow, features, design, and how the application interacted with the toothbrush handle. Our research plan helped create a connected experience that is underpinned by extensive data and user validation, resulting in an industry-leading smart toothbrush that does what it claims – provide 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.
