Make Good Maps
Five years ago, we landed our first client project: experience design for a Chicago-based dental practice with a huge TikTok following. Let us tell you how the 5Es, one of our favorite journey mapping exercises, helped us prepare Dentologie to scale.
Dentologie came to us in 2021 on the verge of growth. Nermin had designed their identity in 2018, when they were just starting out. They’d had time and space to let the brand breathe and figure out what was working, and how they could continually refine and define the practice as the business grew.
With a new lease on a great space in a hot hot hot Chicago neighborhood, the founders were eager to go all out and get it right. Now remember, this was early 2021. We were masked up and gassed up as we toured the raw space, excited to get the Dentologists’ take on the possibilities. A lot of possibilities. Too many possibilities?
Though we had only so many square feet to work with, the founders had big ambitions to create a more humane patient experience: an environment designed to soothe anxiety, promote health and self-care, make people smile…and get them to come back every six months. Thoughtful traffic flow and friendly wayfinding? Check. Superb service and kind communication? Check! How about TVs on the ceiling in operatories? Cozy blankets, to ward off the wintry chill? Aromatherapy! Mirror vinyls! What about the soundscape? What do we call front desk staff?!
When you’ve got a blank canvas, you can do anything. When you can do anything, where do you begin? And how do you know you’re making good choices?
That’s when you turn to strategy.
WHAT MATTERS MOST
We kicked off by anchoring ourselves in the brand’s core values:
We love a values-driven business. We enjoy thinking critically and deeply about what our values mean. What do our values cost us?
What does it mean to create good vibes and be exceptional? How do we put patients first? In what specific ways do we celebrate diversity? What do we commit to caring for—and what do we leave behind—when we get serious about what matters most?
At Dentologie, it meant doubling down on empathy and accessibility. Nearly 73% of adults in the U.S. report some level of anxiety about going to the dentist.
How might we create an environment that anticipates and mitigates fear and anxiety?
It also meant staying on top of the latest and greatest technologies and treatments. Because Dentologie didn’t just want new patients. They wanted patients for life.
How might we deepen trust, love, and loyalty among existing patients, while continuing to expand our reach?
By digging in around values, we began to co-create clear opportunity framing questions and actionable objectives for the designed environment. The Dentologists sparkled in conversation; they were energetic and generous, sincere and curious. We came into our first journey mapping workshop with healthy groundwork already laid. It was time to dump all of our ideas onto the table. From there, we could start discerning the non-negotiables from the nice-to-haves, and figure out how it might all fit together.
THE 5Es OF EXPERIENCE
To get generative, also organized, we spent a spacious hour playing a rousing game of the 5Es. (Big, loving shout out to our erstwhile colleague and forever comrade, Ariel Rudolph, for teaching us this one a decade ago.)
The 5Es are Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Extend. For each, we gave ourselves five minutes to respond to a guiding prompt, with the specific physical environment in mind.
The 5Es of Experience Design
Whenever we do a workshop like this, we lay a few ground rules:
Take space, make space.
Aim for abundance.
Say yes, and.
This is the no-bad-ideas stage. It’s the moment for divergent and lateral thinking, for unexpected left turns, and big swings.
AFTER THE 5Es
The magic comes when you start seeing the constellations emerge. You can determine what’s on brand and what’s off base. What’s essential and what’s extraneous. Grounding in values helps. So does knowing who you’re designing for.
Dentologie was after a mostly Millennial audience. As elder millennials ourselves, we understood the assignment. We’re the generation that killed fabric softener, traditional nine-to-fives, and home ownership! We led the nation in learning to live online when Covid sent us indoors for six months! We’re bombarded by targeted ads that know our spending habits better than we know ourselves. We’d like to buy less garbage. We appreciate the aesthetics of mindfulness; we also crave substance.
How might we integrate playful, immaculate vibes into a thoughtful, personalized health care experience?
With a strong sense of our core values and audience, we got to work parsing the great ideas from the good ones. We took stock of existing resources and creative constraints. Together, we designed a flexible, scalable blueprint for every Dentologie office.
It took shape when we mapped our best ideas from the 5Es to four key “experience zones,” each with specific objectives: Learn, Shop, Relax, Transition. Every aspect of the designed environment mapped to at least one. We thought about the flow between and function of each zone. We considered where and when to make tablets and refreshments available, as well as good spots for selfie backdrops and plant life, and messaging for bathroom mirror decals.
The blueprint was a beauty. All it took was clear values, healthy guardrails, and a lot of brainstorming. Also a keen understanding of audience and landscape. It took synchronizing our schedules and sharing ideas, even the ones we feared were silly. All it took was good strategy, the backbone of good design.
Dentologie has since grown to 17 locations across Chicago and Seattle. Client number one, number one forever in our hearts.
We started this practice with a strong perspective on the marriage between art and science, strategy and design. It’s wild to us, six years later, that we keep finding out how critical each discipline is to the other. How much stronger we make the work when we make it together.
Let us know if you use the 5Es, or if you want a team to come do them for you. We love to make good maps.
