21D Case Study
Designing the patient experience for one of the UK's leading full-mouth implant providers
From a patient mobile app designed end to end, to a full enterprise marketing website redesign and build in Webflow, and an ongoing partnership developing both.
The work I do for 21D sits either side of a single decision. The website has to help someone who has avoided dentists for years believe that a full set of fixed teeth is possible for them. The app has to look after them once they have said yes.
I designed the app first, end to end, and still design new features for it. The website came afterwards, redesigned in Figma, then built in Webflow. Both are now developed and maintained on an ongoing retainer.
What is 21D
21D Clinical is one of the UK's leading full-mouth dental implant providers, offering fixed teeth in a single day.
It is a high-consideration treatment. Patients research for months, often after years of avoiding dentistry altogether, and the decision is as much emotional as it is clinical. Cost is significant, the change is permanent, and what usually stands between a patient and a decision is uncertainty rather than information.
The treatment journey then continues well past the day of surgery, through healing, check-ups and a final set of teeth. It is a relationship measured in months, not a single appointment.
That shapes every part of the digital work. Before treatment, the job is to help someone anxious and undecided understand what is genuinely possible for them and feel confident enough to take the next step. After it, the job is to keep them oriented, informed and supported through a process with a lot of stages in it.
The starting point
The brief was to design a patient app that would sit alongside treatment and carry a patient through it.
21D wanted their patients to have one place to understand what was happening to them, see what was coming next, learn about the treatment at their own pace, reach the practice easily, and meet other people going through the same thing. There was no existing product to extend, so the structure, the flows and the interface were all open questions.
I joined as the designer to answer them, and designed the app end to end.
One brand across two products. 21D provided brand guidelines, and I worked to them across both the app and the website: typography, colour, spacing and the way components behave. A patient who finds 21D through the site and then downloads the app is dealing with one product family rather than two things that happen to share a logo.
Designing the app
My Journey. The centre of the product, and the reason the app exists. My Journey walks a patient through their own treatment as it happens, stage by stage. Each step is explained in plain language at the point it becomes relevant, rather than delivered all at once at the start, when a patient is least able to absorb it. Appointments and check-ups carry their dates and times, so the patient always knows what is next and when.
Designing it meant treating the treatment pathway as the information architecture. The patient's position in their own journey determines what the app shows them, which keeps a long and clinically complex process feeling manageable and specific to them.
Onboarding. The first few minutes decide whether someone in an unfamiliar and slightly nervous state stays with a product. I designed onboarding to get a patient into their journey quickly and with as little demanded of them as possible, introducing what the app does as they go rather than in advance.
Educational hub. Patients want to understand their treatment, but they want it in their own time and in their own order. The hub gives them a place to read and learn independently, which takes pressure off the appointment itself and lets a patient arrive with better questions.
How the role grew
The app came first. On the back of it, 21D asked me to design their marketing website, and after that to maintain and develop it on an ongoing retainer with reserved capacity each week.
That progression matters more than any single deliverable. The engagement widened because each stage earned the next, and the relationship moved from a defined project to a standing partnership across design and front-end development.
Designing the marketing website
The website carries a hard job. It has to explain a serious surgical procedure to people who are frightened of dentists, establish clinical credibility without becoming clinical in tone, and give a visitor a way to picture themselves on the other side of it.
I designed and built it. Not designs handed to a developer, but the full enterprise marketing site delivered end to end in Webflow, from the design system down to the code that runs on the page.
Webflow, extended with custom code. Webflow was the right platform for 21D because it leaves their team able to publish and edit content without going through me for every change. But a site doing this much work needs more than the platform does natively, so most of what makes it distinctive is custom built.
The interactive 3D anatomy piece, the smile simulator integration, the conversion system that adapts to each page, the enquiry form presentation layer and the video loading behaviour are all custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript written to sit inside Webflow rather than fight it. Everything is built to keep working when someone on the 21D side adds a page or edits a section, which is the part that usually breaks when custom code meets a visual builder.
The result is a full enterprise marketing site with the polish and behaviour of a bespoke build, on a platform the client can actually run themselves.
Built for a mobile audience. The overwhelming majority of 21D's visitors arrive on a phone, so mobile is the primary case rather than a breakpoint to accommodate. The floating call to action reflects that, sitting as a persistent bar within thumb reach so a visitor who reaches the point of readiness partway down a long page does not have to go looking for the next step. Video loads only as it comes into view, keeping a media-heavy site quick on a phone connection, and the 3D anatomy piece reflows to stack and carries the reader to the relevant explanation when they tap a marker.
Building around the moment of imagination. The most persuasive thing 21D can offer a prospective patient is not a statistic or a testimonial. It is seeing their own face with the treatment applied. The site is designed so the smile simulation tools sit at the centre of the journey rather than off to one side, and built the integration that brings them into the site experience directly, so a visitor moves from reading to trying without a visible handover.
Explaining the treatment in three dimensions. Full-mouth implant treatment is difficult to describe in words and unconvincing in stock photography. I designed and built an interactive 3D anatomy piece for the research section of the site: a rotating model a visitor can explore, with markers that open a plain-language explanation of each part of the procedure in a panel alongside.
I built it as a self-contained piece of custom JavaScript running inside a Webflow embed, with no external dependencies for 21D to maintain. It reflows to stack on smaller screens and carries the reader to the relevant explanation when they tap a marker. For a treatment most people cannot picture, it does more work than a page of copy.
Results
Designed 21D's patient mobile app end to end, covering onboarding, My Journey, the educational hub, chat and community, and continue to design new features for it
Designed and built the full enterprise marketing website for one of the UK's leading full-mouth implant providers, delivered end to end in Webflow and extended with custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Built the integration that puts the smile simulation tools at the centre of the site journey rather than to one side of it
Delivered a site-wide conversion system that adapts what it offers to the page and the visitor's stage of thinking
Built an interactive 3D anatomy explainer that makes a complex surgical procedure understandable to a non-clinical audience
Grew a single defined project into an ongoing retained partnership across app design, web design and front-end development
The partnership continues
The app continues to gain features and the website continues to be developed rather than left to age. The focus now is on tightening the path between a visitor's first moment of curiosity and a booked assessment, and on extending the app so it stays useful to a patient across the full length of their treatment and beyond it.
It has become the kind of engagement I aim to build with every client. Trusted enough to own outcomes, not just deliverables.