BostonSight Fitconnect App

Ditching the instruction manual

We took a consumer-oriented approach to make a complex platform simple.

  • Alignment Workshops

    Bring stakeholders together through structured, facilitated sessions that establish priorities and strategies for a path forward.

  • Competitive Analysis

    See where you shine, where you don’t, and how to leverage that intel to fill the most important gaps in your experience.

  • Taxonomy Research

    Avoid internal bias with quantitative research methods that let users create the most intuitive navigation groupings for their needs.

  • Accessibility Audits

    We make accessibility easy — from the early stages of design through final development, we ensure the latest compliance standards are always top of mind.

  • Experience Strategy

    We evaluate internal perceptions, user goals and best practices to find that “special sauce” that drives an actionable roadmap for your future experience.

  • Sketches

    When it comes to bringing ideas to life, the pencil is mightier than the keyboard. And much faster.

  • Prototypes

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Bringing the user experience to life with a fully-interactive artifact is a low-cost, high-value way to iterate without the investment of code.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • Design Systems

    Good design will translate to a good design system — and vice versa. Build your brand with well-defined styles and components at the heart, and it will grow and breathe well.

  • User Testing

    To get decisive, actionable findings, we let users explore without artificial restrictions. We design our prototypes to accommodate this need, as a final product would.

  • Functional Specifications

    Converting your designs into well-documented specifications with functionality, flows, layout, and styles ensures that no developer has to guess what comes next.

The Challenge

Soft contact lenses are great for most people, but they aren’t for everyone. For those with hard-to-fit eyes, astigmatism, severe dry eye, or other conditions, scleral lenses are a wonderful alternative. Customizing sizes and lens configurations, however, that ain’t easy.

BostonSight developed a web platform called FitConnect that allowed optometrists to order custom scleral lenses with a variety of parameters and settings. The early versions of the platform were functional—as long as you were ready to wade through the application’s hefty documentation and get trained on its use. As BostonSight’s customer base grew, they realized they had to fix the user experience if their business was going to be a success.

A practitioner dashboard was created to put the most important information and tools at the doctors fingertips
A practitioner dashboard was created to put the most important information and tools at the doctors fingertips

Our Approach

To help modernize the FitConnect application, ZeroDegrees evaluated usability, revamped the information architecture, updated the visual design, and helped raise the findability of key value-added features. 

And, of course, we talked to customers. From their perspective, it was clear that we should “make it like any other shopping site”. A physician ordering highly customized contact lenses is certainly different than buying a T-shirt. But just because this was a B2B site doesn’t mean it had to behave like one.

Well organized step-by-step process that guides practitioners through selecting, customizing and ordering a new lens
Well organized step-by-step process that guides practitioners through selecting, customizing and ordering a new lens

To meet deadlines and goals for site development, we needed to be as efficient as possible with design activities. Because FitConnect is an application for a specific audience, we prioritized usability testing and feedback from optometrists. We paired that with design workshops and design best practices to help BostonSight’s UX vision come clearly into focus.

A clearer patient view to aid in tracking their order history and past fittings, with easy access to create a new lens
A clearer patient view to aid in tracking their order history and past fittings, with easy access to create a new lens

The Results

When we tested the design solution, users had a lot to say about the results. Here are a few nuggets from the feedback sessions:

“This feels really smooth and easy. I like that there are some tips that are available too. I feel like the whole thing got moved forward ten years.”

“I am confident that I could maneuver through here very easily. I don’t see myself as having issues where I would get stuck and have to call consultation. I could do this easily.”

And the product stakeholders were happy, too:

Everyone is thrilled with the new design

…and the efficiencies it will create not only for our external customers but also our internal stakeholders. The new order flow is fantastic! We greatly appreciate your expertise on bringing our functional application to a modern, sleek design that highlights the functionality of FitConnect and capabilities of BostonSight.

Sara Yost, Chief executive officer, Bostonsight