UX / UI / FLOW / ASSETS

VisionDirect Glasses

THE GOAL

VisionDirect.co.uk is market leader in UK and Europe for contact lenses and Eyecare, yet glasses was not part of the offering until very recently. Below I will illustrate how we tackled the task of delivering Glasses MVP that is tailored to our audience and meets our business requirements. Our goal was to deliver Glasses MVP to market that can handle prescription capture in easy and intuitive way, display large variety of frames available and be appealing to glasses audience.

THE CHALLENGE

There are quite a few companies in UK offering glasses online but we felt that the vast majority of them didn’t offer easy, understandable way to find, purchase and customise your frames.

There are few market challenges that we found during our initial research phase

•  Glasses prescriptions come in all shapes and sizes

• Customers quite often don’t understand their prescriptions and optician terminology

• Orders take long time to produce and are prone to errors

But it’s not all bad, there were few factors that gave us advantage over our competition

• We had access to our in-house optician team

• We understood our audience

We conducted initial research via market survey to find out peoples attitude towards buying glasses online, how they handle prescriptions, their challenges and also what delights them. Initial findings suggested that process has to be really easy for customer as there is lots of confusion around glasses purchase. We brainstormed few ideas and came up with initial user journey that would be tailored to our main factor – ease of navigation and ease of purchase.

By separating most crucial journey actions into separate areas we allowed ourselves to bring focus and customer attention and hopefully minimise errors. We’ve created simple wireframe prototype to test and got very positive results on interactions and journey as a whole. Main positive point that came out of prototype testing were customer comments around ‘customisation journey’ being standalone and very easy to understand.

Customisation journey is 3 step process that keeps focus on task at hand and provides guidance and advice on proceeding further.

Step 1 – Capture glasses type

Step 2 – Capture lenses package

Step 3 – Capture prescription

One of the things that differentiates us from competition is how we capture prescription information

Most of our competitors in the marketplace allow customers to enter their own prescription values in, often, quite confusing manner using lots of industry terms. From our initial research we knew that most of glasses buyers are not opticians and they don’t understand the lingo so we came up with different way which was very well received by customers who tested our initial prototype. Essentially there are three options

• Upload a photo of your prescription

• Send it to us later

• Have us call your optician

By capturing prescription information this way we assumed we will provide better experience for customer but also reduce business costs. We really wanted to provide sense of hand holding as we knew how confusing and tricky it can be to buy glasses and deal with prescriptions given by opticians. We did meet and exceed our goal and as of MVP live date we have

• Lowest returns rate in UK ( our return rate is 3% versus competitors 20% )

• Lowest error rate in UK ( our error rate is 2% versus competitors 15% )