Eyewear Design
Research & Product Development
Overview
Felix Gray started with great success marketing to Wall Street analysts who use their glasses to remedy long hours of screen time. To keep growing they needed to appeal to a broader and more feminine audience. I worked with them as a consultant in early 2019 to design new frames to attract a broader audience for the successful blue light blocking e-commerce start up.
Goals
Attracted a broader market.
Create a better selection of frame choices for their existing market.
Develop and codify Felix Gray’s style.
Outcome
New frames are best sellers on site and appeal to much broader audience
Chosen by female influencers
Product strategy continues for new frames following the plan we developed
Team & process
As a consulting designer I worked directly with the head of product and the co-founder/CEO to develop the approach and the designs. Our process focused on direct consumer feedback to both the images of the designs online as well as the fit of the frames trying them on.
Trends & Landscape Assessment
Concept Development
Testing digital concept prototypes
Testing physical product prototypes
Defining color & launch strategy
After ideating on emergent themes that might inform the type of frame we would want to pursue, we compared the existing product line with what we had and developed our hypothesis for the frames that would best expand our product reach. Then I created testable assets for a user test.
Wizard of Oz Test
Does anyone care? Before we invested the time and money to build this data product we did a simple manual version to see if our users would find this type of information useful. We recruited 20 folks and manually extracted their brushing data from their power brushes at the end of the week. I then calculated and texted them a weekly report on the amount of time they brushed, how often they brushed and a small improvement goal for the next week. Even though the process was clunky we saw a 50% gain in overall time spent brushing after just two notifications. We continued to use the manual messaging in small scale tests to refine what kinds of information users liked and how often they liked to receive it without having to make complicated dev changes.
Printing prototype designs to fit test.
Physical Prototyping - Form Refinement
Everyone’s face is a little different and glasses change entirely when they are placed on a face. To refine the design I spent a few weeks recruiting every friend and neighbor who stopped by to try on my frames and see how they liked them. For each person I took a picture and focused on four areas of the frame to define fit. First the outermost corner of the fame needed to extend up to their ear to print temple pain. The lower corner of the frame needs to line up with the corner of the cheek. The brow angle should match the eyebrow angle in order to lift the expression and the center of the pupil needs to be in the upper and inner quadrant of the lens shape. From these tests I slightly adjusted the shape of each frame in order to better fit the face. Each change was less that 3mm, but the outcome on the face is significant.
Final Frame Selection for Launch
Using the Trigger, Action, Varaible Reward and Investment theory from Nir Eyals book, Hooked. Our hypothesis was we could create engaging content out of your own brushing data. We broke down the message like this:
Trigger: Push notification at an expected time (like apple screen time)
Action: Open notification
Launch & Growth
After a slow start they found their audience
Not a Overnight Success
After the frames launched I was so proud to see them on the site but they didn’t start off selling well. For awhile the only consolation I had was that many of the female influencers Felix Gray hired seemed to pick the frames I had designed. Reflecting on the process, I know more now about statistical significance and how I would segment the audience better and use stronger controls. Even so, I felt I had done a good job designing a frame for a specific user group and was confused about why it didn’t seem to connect.
Then, three years later I noticed that “Lovelace” had been re-stocked in every color and was now labeled a best seller. My tentative conclusion is that just making a product that fits a new market doesn’t mean that new market knows about it yet, or that the brand is in the right place to welcome a new demographic. Perhaps a successful product requires both the right design and the right marketing to find its audience.
