2024
Seamless Vision: a phygital UX despite unclear product ownership
Designing the identity of a first-of-its-kind global prescription eyewear service, using a physical artifact (a voucher) to work around B2B billing constraints.
Seen from France, the problem Seamless Vision solves does not exist. That is precisely what made this project hard to frame, and it was not its only difficulty: the company took it on with no experience of creating a digital service, on very short deadlines, and with no clearly established ownership.
Bollé Safety
Art Direction - Creative Manager
Product & User Experience, Physical & Event Experience
A problem you cannot see from Europe
French reasoning assumes two things: coverage by the health system, and a dense network of opticians. Neither is a given elsewhere, notably in the United States or in the industrial and mining regions of Australia, which are often very sparsely populated.
Someone who wears prescription glasses generally already has an eye prescription for their personal pair. Their optician, though, rarely offers safety frames and lenses, and the cost would fall to them anyway. The result: an employee who needs prescription protective eyewear faces a chain that does not exist for them anywhere.
Seamless Vision makes it possible to order a pair of prescription PPE from anywhere in the world, working from a medical prescription. The whole optician service is digitized and supported by a team of opticians available online, which gives access to a catalog of corrective equipment without having to travel.
The voucher, ordering bespoke the way you order off the catalog
Buying online by bank card exists, but that is not what makes the program adoptable by a company. The voucher is.
Prescription PPE is made to order, which makes it incompatible with the way a company manages its protective equipment, namely by stock and annual budget. The voucher resolves exactly that incompatibility: the company buys a quantity for the year, secures its budget, and made-to-measure production is only triggered when the need actually arises.
It produces a second effect, less obvious and just as useful. The voucher is handed to the employee, who orders their own equipment. The employer steps out of the logistics loop, the wearer chooses from the catalog and submits their prescription without going through their EHS department. That is what explains the choice of a physical artifact with the proportions of a gift card rather than a simple code: an object handed over in person is understood without instructions and gives value a physical form.
A service with no owner
The context has to be described as it was, because it explains the shape of my contribution.
At Bollé Safety, the digital team is a support function at group level, in the same way as IT. On that basis it appeared to be the project's owner, as the custodian of the tools. But Seamless Vision is first and foremost a service proposition from the brand, tied directly to product expertise and marketing. Two claims to legitimacy, then, and neither of them settled.
The consequence was visible throughout the project: two entities communicating poorly, and decisions taken sometimes with and sometimes without the relevant expertise in the room. I was brought into some user experience decisions and kept out of others, without the rule ever being made explicit.
I do not tell it as a grievance but as a diagnosis, because the cause is structural and repeats itself everywhere: a digital service carried by a tooling function rather than by a product function moves forward with no referee, and the absence of a referee is paid for in round trips and inconsistencies. My effective scope therefore concentrated on what I could hold end to end: the service identity, the communication assets, the training material and the physical presentation experience.
An S that interlocks the need and the service
The mark is subject to the same directive as the company's other brand IPs, an imposed typeface and the need to extract from it a minimal form able to work on its own.
The S of Seamless carries the fluidity of the journey. It sits inside a diamond which, for its part, frames the process and gives it its boundary. The construction plays out in the relationship between the two: the S is knocked out, and cuts the diamond into two parts that complement each other and interlock exactly. Those two halves state the connection between the user and the service, the need and the product, in a mark that only works if both pieces exist together.
Making sense of a service that resembles nothing that exists
The central difficulty in the communication was of a different order than the aesthetic. Seamless Vision does nothing comparable to what came before: there is no reference, no established visual code, no familiar gesture to attach the journey to. Everything had to be invented, on a subject that is also highly technical, optical prescription applied to protective equipment.
The storytelling rests on a 3D sequence shot, which breaks the service down as one continuous run rather than as juxtaposed steps. The form answers the problem: a service nobody knows is better understood as a movement than as a diagram.
It was produced with a freelancer, delivery speed and budget constraint having taken precedence over fine-tuning the art direction. It is a decision I own and that should be named: on a project whose necessity was to exist quickly, holding onto comprehension of the service mattered more than perfecting its visual execution.
A landing page proposal, not selected
I designed a landing page mockup for the service. It is not the one that went live, and it is presented here as a proposal rather than as a delivered piece in production.
Its principle rested on reading the traffic two ways. A visitor arriving from organic search is discovering the service and needs educating before converting; a visitor arriving from a paid campaign, or already holding a voucher, wants to get straight to their account. Handling both populations on a single page means segmenting the experience by source rather than averaging the two needs and satisfying neither.
What the program was meant to produce
Expectations were high. The minimum objective set for the program was to double the revenue of the Prescription business, until then carried mainly by networks of partner opticians in France, England and Australia, at an average campaign pace.
I do not know what results were achieved. The program launched shortly before I left, and I prefer to leave that figure absent rather than put forward an estimate. What this project demonstrates sits elsewhere in any case: in the ability to give a comprehensible form to a service that had none, in an organizational context that did not make the task easier.
Related projects