UX Design and Upgrade to Drupal 9 of the Leading Italian Dental Communication Portal .

CLIENT

The client is Bplus - Dental and Medical Communication, which in 1988 published INFODENT®, the first Italian free press for dental merchandise information. Active since 1988, it has continued to grow over the years, thanks in part to the Infodent.it portal. With its tens of thousands of subscribers, it has become a true benchmark in the Italian market for companies and associations, dentists, dental technicians, hygienists, and assistants.
 

OBJECTIVE

Efficient migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 and enhancement of the UX for the Infodent.it portal, ensuring an optimised user experience across all devices.

A Site, Thousands of Users and Contents

The original platform, developed in Drupal 7, contained a vast amount of data: approximately 50,000 users, 2,000 ads, and 1,500 news items. The multiple types of content and the various relationships between them made the site's architecture very complex.
Registered users on the portal could consult published material, ranging from industry events, news, and scientific papers to features and comparisons of new products on the market. They could also create content by posting job ads or ads for buying and selling equipment.

Upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9

The portal presented a particularly detailed and complex structure, and it was necessary to transfer on Drupal 9 all the functionalities that have been made available over the years for the various types of users who use the portal daily: from administrators in charge of managing users, ads, advertising, content publishing, etc., to other figures who can interact with the platform in various ways based on their role.

The go-live of the new portal had to be carried out minimizing downtime, swiftly transferring the same contents and users who had been operating on the Drupal 7 instance until recently.

 The Strategy
 

The work was divided into several phases:

UX Analysis

After an initial analysis of the User Experience, the different data models, and the existing functionalities (such as banners, users, ads, etc.), possible scenarios, User Stories, and User Flows were created, with the necessary types of flow.
New functionalities were also established, and subsequently, wireframes were submitted to the client to agree on the final structure of the website.

Custom Module Development

In the second phase, we focused on the actual development of the site and the creation of custom modules, to be used for the migration and to align the data model of the site in Drupal 7 with that designed for the Drupal 9 version.
An analysis of the custom modules present on the old site and their reengineering was also necessary so that the same functionalities could be transferred to the new platform.

Migration and Launch

As for the data migration phase and the launch of the site in Drupal 9, every piece of data was preserved without affecting the functionality and usability of the platform

Monitoring and Management Upgrade

Given the large number of actions that the site admins must manage and monitor, custom panels were developed to allow an immediate overview of the general situation in terms of ads, users, and messages, or to delve into the details of a specific event. For example, we structured:

 

• A notification system to support moderators in publishing and checking ads and to alert users in case of a response to their ad;
• A control panel to facilitate the management of advertising spaces through which administrators can insert banners in specific sections of the site: once the impressions are finished or the expiry date of the ad is reached, the ad is automatically removed, and the space becomes available to other advertisers.

Responsive

It was also requested that the responsive design be pixel-perfect, in order to make the site accessible and navigable from desktop, tablet, and especially mobile, allowing users and administrators to smoothly and intuitively reach every functionality of the portal.
Infodent requested an analytical and tailor-made approach, which allowed us to tackle data migration and technical complexities with such tight downtime that it did not affect the portal's activity and the company's business.
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