Specsavers are known and loved for a customer experience that delivers care and value to all. But those values weren’t coming through in the online experience. The ‘Booking an eye test’ process felt clinical and unclear – and it wasn’t accessible.

Taking advantage of a technology replatform, our core objective was to combine optics and audiology booking journeys, from homepage to confirmation, and optimise the overall booking experience to make it open to all. A secondary objective was to create a set of re-usable components that could be standardised across regions, helping to enable global consistency.

When the pandemic hit the importance of creating a cohesive, responsive experience was even more important. Making it easy for those who weren’t previously used to using an online appointment booking experience was critical, while providing reassurance and confidence to all.

Our creative vision was simple: create an experience where customers feel genuinely cared for, designed to break down the barriers to better sight and hearing.

The biggest barriers were complexity, accessibility and consistency. So we streamlined every detail to reduce complexity and distraction. Calls-to-action are now front and centre, alongside a robust and flexible calendar system that put users in control. Every click is fully accessible. With easy navigation for screen readers, scaling up button font legibility and launching site-wide accessibility annotations, this also included mapping out a tabbing order for every page, crafting aria labels for interactive assets and creating alt text for all images.

To drive global consistency, we created an Atomic Design System that could replicate the learnings at scale. Each new component ensures consistent usability patterns, helping both designers and developers focus on creating new products systematically and at speed.

To understand how we could enable the simplest, most intuitive, most human way for people to book their appointments, we researched how customers approached their health care needs and combined it with an understanding of their appointment booking habits – determining our audience by mindset, rather than demographics.

The research was designed to uncover broad, open, behavioural insights to understand triggers, motivations, behaviours and the decision-making process. Research was broken down into interviews, experience benchmarking against other booking services, card sorting activities and prototype testing. This enabled us to identify different needs, behaviours and responses between two core groups (time-pressured audiences vs. pre-planners) and ensure the final design could meet both their needs.

Rigorous accessibility testing was carried out along with a quantitative user test with over 1,000 respondents before going live. Iterations of the homepage and booking journey were also a/b tested live to ensure the hardest

We were first briefed in November 2020 to tackle the pain points of the booking journey, as it became clear that COVID-19 was continuing to make retail a challenging trading environment.

We separated the homepage and appointment booking journey so we were able to develop and test each of the discrete steps – from the store locator to the date & time picker – to make sure they were all actively contributing to an improved experience.

In January 2021 we started, ‘The Spectacle’, our Atomic Design System. The components developed for the ‘booking an appointment’ journey set the founding principles. As we evolved, design libraries were then created specifically for each digital product.

The optimised experience went live in January 2022 in the UK and the new booking journey is now being rolled out across all Specsavers websites globally on a market-by-market implementation.

Today, specsavers.co.uk is open to all, with an intuitive booking experience for everyone in the UK (coming soon to all other markets).

The evolved homepage design delivered an increase of +202% visits to audiology, +29% visits to see glasses and +5.8% visits to optics. From this first step, the streamlined booking journey also resulted in a 3.6% increase in bookings.

And all of this is supported by a best-in-class design system. The implementation of which has halved the time it takes to design, optimise and build digital products across Specsavers’ markets.

All helping to create an experience truly valued by users, "Usually when people build these websites, they don’t think about how it is for the consumer, but with this one it really feels like they have considered how they try and help the user.” UK website, user response. I’m