Overview
Dandy is the first fully digital dental lab. Dental practices use Dandy's Chairside scanning app to take 3D impressions and order restorations digitally. The business goal was to get every practice to adopt Chairside as their default.
Adoption, however, was stalling. Experienced doctors, loyal to a competitor's software, refused to switch, and app reviews made the friction impossible to ignore. Through daily review reads, Fullstory sessions, and in-person practice visits, we found the workflow didn't map to how practices actually operate.
We shipped a single flexible workflow with contextual guidance instead of a beginner/expert split. The result: 99% adoption within 10 months, and a direct contribution to Dandy crossing $100M in ARR from Chairside orders.
01 / Core problem
Experienced doctors using a competing platform (Trios) were frustrated with Chairside or refusing to use it altogether. The step-by-step guided workflow didn't match how practices actually operate chairside with a patient in the room, and the UX felt foreign to doctors who already had muscle memory from another tool.
02 / Process
I read reviews daily, matched them to Fullstory session recordings, and visited dental practices in person to observe how doctors used the app with patients in chair. I ran ~10 interviews to understand two distinct user types: new-to-digital doctors vs. experienced Trios users.
03 / Solution
I shipped a redesigned Chairside experience with improved top navigation that let doctors jump between steps freely, combined with contextual guidance that surfaced best-practice prompts only when relevant, and only when the doctor hadn't already shown they knew what they were doing.
We launched gradually in cohorts to manage change carefully with a resistant user base.
04 / Results
The feedback signal flipped almost immediately after launch, and the trend held as we rolled out to more cohorts.
