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When I joined King Children, the startup had established a direct-to-consumer (D2C) app and manufacturing back end to deliver custom fit 3D fabricated eyewear to app store consumers. Our CEO identified the opportunity for our company to partner with stakeholders in the optometry space, leveraging our platforms to reimagine how clinics could sell eyewear.
My first move to support my team, which included our CEO, a small software development team, our operations manager, and our design lead, was to build context with insights from eyecare industry data.
I identified opportunity areas in some of the challenges eye care practices (ECPs) were facing: while a historically large percentage of their revenue came from eyewear sales, these practices were losing eyewear customers to other players in the eyewear space. ECPs couldn't compete on their offering with the variety and price offered by companies like Warby Parker and Zenni Optical, nor could they compete on advertising or patient quantity with big box retailers like Costco.
I presented these findings to our team to build a group familiarity with the industry, informing the questions we brought to our field research and design.
Next, to flesh out my concept of the pain points faced by eyecare professionals and patients, I conducted research by posing as an ECP customer curious about the business and space of optometry. Manhattan provided a wealth of different ECP types, so I narrowed down my focus to those already showcasing interesting sales techniques: custom consultations, novel technology, proprietary lines, and other distinct pieces analogous to the product we were proposing to sell through similar channels.
Combining the eyecare industry information with my experience in ECPs representing our target audience, I workshopped a problem statement with our team:
King Children’s relationship with a pilot ECP proved a valuable source of context as we started to craft a plan for our entry into eyewear sales at optometrists. I ran interviews sessions with the optician and owner of our partner practice to understand what we would need to include in a potential offering for ECPs to be comfortable and willing to sell our product. From these interviews, I generated an exhaustive list of requirements for our operations team to implement, including prescription lens fitting, order systems, packaging, pricing, and a starter kit.
In collaboration with our partner practice and operations team, we built out a full representation of the back-of-house blueprint for eyewear delivery. I also helped deliver a prototype design for the starter kit delivered to ECPs for selling our product, which set our team up for scrappy field testing.
Armed with a basic knowledge of how our offering needed to function from an ECP perspective, I looked to evaluate features in software builds through field usability tests. From these tests, my notes on interaction patterns, types of users, and choke points led to the creation of key personas, as well as journey maps for different app flow architectures.
These tools, along with UI mockups and previous D2C app data, were used to inform tiered software update lists for our development team to address obstacles in the conversion funnel. This highly iterative process required open and constructive communication with our small group of coders as we sought to mitigate our update requests with the difficult overhead they faced in restructuring the app for updates.
Even as UI improvements led to our first sales at our pilot location, I noticed a key player being underserved: the UI improvements to our app were succeeding in drawing more interest from customers but failing to incorporate with the optician’s sales pitching, leaving us as an undesirable option for the people best equipped to make sales. After interviewing the optician at our pilot ECP to understand her needs with regards to using our product as a sales tool, I initiated a sprint discussion with our team, which led to a restructuring of our offering placement to become a concierge service delivered by opticians as opposed to a waiting room diversion for customers.
Full delivery of this new direction, however, required a more holistic vision of how our app was to be utilized in the ECP context. Drawing on my architectural software experience as well as inspiration and insights from my in person ECP exploration, I provided the team with a concept concierge ECP interior to serve as both a reference and communications tool. At the time I finished my internship, the dev team was still working on a build of the app that incorporated concierge service with the recommendations and reference material I provided.
Along with this interaction paradigm, I helped inform decisions for the new brand identity we created for our product line. The colors and font were chosen to convey a clean, medical, and trustworthy feel, in accordance with responses from ECP professionals as to how they envisioned our product. I also incorporated aspects of this mood into how we chose and conveyed in-app copy to make our offering feel seamlessly on message.
My final effort on this project was to package our omnichannel vision for a pitch to the executive board of a large optometry practice buying group. In this presentation, I chose to highlight the aspects of our offering that drew from our research into user empathy, especially as it pertained to insights into ECP professional struggles; the board was comprised of optometrists and opticians who had risen to prominence in their industry, so the pitch was tailored to resonate with their needs. The pitch was met with positive buy-in from all of the board members, validating our work in the ECP space and positioning King Children for future pilots and product rollouts to their extensive network.
With a comprehensive UX approach, I built an understanding of the eye care practice experience, employed test-and-learn practices to assess where our product fit in, and defined the approach for our new offering in the eye care space.
