Essilor of America wanted a complete redesign of their global web presence. Focusing on connecting with consumers while supporting the optometrists that help them.
UX, Experience Design, Prototyping, User Research, Digital Marketing
Essilor USA Site Consolidation
The Ask
Essilor of America is the largest manufacturer of eyeglass lenses in the United States.
The corporate Essilor brand was struggling with low awareness and affinity. The sub-brands within the Essilor family felt fragmented to the consumer. The Essilor brand team decided to bring the sub-brands under one marketing umbrella: Essilor USA.
Seven websites needed to be consolidated into one cohesive site that clearly communicated the product’s benefits, how they worked together and how they can help solve the user’s specific eye issues.
My role was to lead user experience design, strategy, and research, direct cross-discipline teams, and manage client relationship during the project lifecycle.
Getting Started
I ran a 3-day immersion workshop on site at the clients’ office. I lead sessions with a group of more than 20 stakeholders focusing on developing key personas, defining needs for content, prioritizing key functionality and developing consumer journeys.
This session helped to build bridges between the team and stakeholders as well as push to unify the vision across a very large group of stakeholders with different goals.
Consolidation
After our session, the core content “wants” from a business perspective were clearer. The client wanted us to repurpose as much content as possible to reduce costs, so I took a deep dive across all sites to audit content.
We created a content matrix that would grow and evolve over the course of the project. It helped to identify redundant, quality, and archivable content. It was key to building out the sitemap and content development needs.
Even though the client thought they knew their target personas, I wanted to speak to them to make sure we were clear on what the site should do for them.
Helping users choose
After speaking with consumers and eye doctors, it was clear that they needed help not only understand the complex technology but choosing which is right for their needs.
With that in mind, I started to design a wizard that would walk users through the process of finding the right product.
I experimented with different flows and wordings for the questions based on some learnings from how opticians guided their customers through the process of choosing a lens for their glasses.
I created a set of prototypes which I used while running user testing sessions to help confirm the flow and language that resonated most with users.
Framework Design
The client utilized Adobe Experience Manager as their CMS. We wanted to take full advantage of the system’s capabilities.
I focused on creating a flexible component-based design system that would give us the ability for dynamic personalization as well as multivariate testing.
Many whiteboard sessions with devs, creatives and systems analysts later, we had what we needed. A set of templates and components that would ultimately create a ton of efficiencies during the build phase as well as reduce maintenance costs.
Explore the wireframes
Result
- The output was a modular template system in Adobe Experience Manager that allows great flexibility for the client and creative teams. Ultimately simplifying site management and reducing turn around time and cost to implement on new content.
- Atomic design allowed that creative team to rapidly produce assets and create efficiencies through production.
- The experiences content was designed to dynamically react to certain personalization triggers so that we can get the right content in front of users are the right time.
- Site architecture based on users needs instead of complicated industry eye terms allows users to discover products that may fit their needs in a more relatable way making lenses less complicated.
- Overall site conversions have risen 300% and increases in engagement through the configuration tool have help to drive users to their local eye care professionals.