Subscription Management

With our primary offering of contacts many users only purchased once a year. 1-800 Contacts wanted to position itself as an eye health care company and the Subscription was going to be our first foothold. The existing subscription flow was confusing while also diverging significantly from patterns on the website. The job was two-fold: bring subscription's UI in line with the brand system we'd just established, and revamp the flow so it can scale with our larger vision.

We ran qualitative research on how people currently interacted with subscriptions in general and what they would want from their 1-800 Contacts subscription.

We also looked outside the category, pulling from Chewy and other subscription-first products for patterns that already worked.

Challenges

• We were working with a single product category but needed to have infrastructure to scale
• Basic subscription controls were missing from the app, like the ability to snooze a shipment

Opportunities

• Subscription as a convenience play now, with room to grow into a cross-sell channel later, as the product line expanded.
• Proven patterns to borrow from (Chewy, others)
• Web already validated some of the feature list

Although web had already built a more robust Subscription flow, we wanted to make sure that the app experience didn’t just feel like a copy of the website. Using native conventions for iOS/Android users, I took what web validated and made it feel like it belonged in the app.

The designs went through various rounds of feedback from the app team, the web team, and the brand team. But ultimately we were able to improve the customer experience today while setting us up for future success.

What shipped

• A streamlined subscription setup flow, aimed at the drop-off point we'd hypothesized
• UI brought in line with the new brand component system
• Previously-missing subscription controls, including snooze
• Subscription positioned as the first step toward the broader eye-health hub vision

Where it stood

After launching this product, I relocated. No longer at 1-800 Contacts, I wasn’t able to see how it drove the metrics. The team was excited and the initial usability tests were promising.