DR-HO'S sells drug-free pain relief devices — and almost none of their customers looked like the personas guiding their old design decisions. Here's how I closed that gap.
Conversion Rate
+122%
Net Sales
+212%
Orders
+149%
Company: DR-HO'S
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
Industry: Fitness & Wellness
My role: Full Site Overhaul · UX/UI Design · Landing Page Design
DR-HO'S is a leading manufacturer of pain relief devices founded by Dr. Michael Ho. What makes this project worth breaking down isn't the industry — it's that their real customers didn't match the assumptions baked into the site. While most ecommerce brands design for a younger, tech-fluent buyer, DR-HO'S built its loyal base among adults over 50 managing chronic pain. Their site, however, was designed the way most sites are: for a 25-year-old scrolling on autopilot, not for the person actually buying.
1
The "Young Designer, Old Customer" Gap
DR-HO'S old site looked modern. It also failed almost everyone using it. Small tap targets, low-contrast text, and a navigation structure that assumed fast scanning and easy piecing-together of information — all fine for a younger user, all friction for theirs.
This is a blind spot that's easy to miss internally: the team building the site is rarely the person buying from it. Once I started digging into how actual customers were using the site, the disconnect was obvious. This wasn't a "make it prettier" problem. It was a "the person who needs this the most can't use it" problem — and that's a conversion problem, not a cosmetic one.
2
Designing for Reality, Not Demographics
The easy trap here is treating "older adults" as a demographic checkbox — bigger font, done. I treated it as a behavior problem instead: what does someone managing chronic pain actually need to feel confident buying a medical device online?
That meant:
Larger, unambiguous clickable areas and higher contrast — not as accessibility add-ons, but as conversion features
Product pages rebuilt to answer what it does, how it helps, why it works in that order, without making people hunt.
A homepage-to-checkout rebuild, not a patch — this was a full site overhaul, not a redesign of a few pages.
The underlying idea: when you design for your hardest-to-serve user, you tend to make the experience better for everyone else too.
3
The Results
+122% conversion rate
+212% net sales
+149% orders
60% customer service calls about "website problems"
A meaningful increase in average time spent on product pages
What stood out most: these gains weren't limited to the older-adult segment. Clarity and simplified navigation lifted performance across every age group that visited the site — which is usually a sign the design fixed something structural, not just something demographic.
4
Key Takeaways
Test with the people who'll actually feel the friction. A designer without joint pain can't simulate what it's like to tap a small button with reduced dexterity. Testing directly with people in DR-HO'S target demographic surfaced friction points that looked completely fine in the design file.
Information hierarchy matters more when cognitive load is higher. Younger users scan and piece things together across sections. Older adults tend to prefer linear, complete information in the order they'd naturally ask questions. I restructured product pages around that sequence instead of around what looked best visually.
Trust signals need to be obvious, not clever. Skepticism is healthy when someone's about to spend money on a health product. Social proof needed to be impossible to miss — without tipping into pushy.
Mobile isn't "desktop, but smaller." Holding patterns, finger dexterity, and screen preferences differ by user. Mobile interactions were redesigned specifically for larger targets and simpler gestures — mobile was often the actual moment of purchase decision, not an afterthought.
Inclusive design is profitable design. The same principles that make a site usable for older adults — clarity, simplicity, obvious navigation — tend to lift conversion across every segment. It's not just the right call ethically; it's the one with the better ROI.