Made4U Personalization: A new shopping experience
Personalization has been central to the concept of Made4U since the inception of the project four years ago. It was stated from the beginning that Made4U was not about mass customization, where customers could pick and choose a number of standard options to accommodate their personal needs and wishes. In other words, it wasn’t meant to be like configuring a desktop computer online, or like buying a brand new automobile with extras selected from a features catalogue. Made4U spectacles were conceived to be unique objects belonging to (and used by) single individuals, whose anthropometric facial characteristics and corrective vision prescriptions would become the determinant design factors.
It has been equally obvious at the outset that personalized spectacles would have to be initially sold to a distinguished and ‘brand-name’ aware public as niche, high value products. Customers should be attracted to these objects by their quality merits in the first place, but, at the same time, also by the novelty of the new experience during the ‘user co-design” phase. Like having dinner at a high-class restaurant, user experience could not only be left to rely upon the taste and uniqueness of available meals, but equally so upon their presentation on the dish and appropriate silverware used, as well as the whole entourage of waiters, reception, sitting, waiting and serving routines, and, last but not least, the superior atmosphere of the venue premises. In fact, it is all about real and perceived value for money that customers will eventually pay to receive.
It is therefore desirable to conceive the entire buying process of Made4U spectacles as a rather fresh, modern, high-tech, and greatly valued buying experience, somehow comparable to the sale of Apple Inc. products via their own dedicated stores available in the US and elsewhere. Apple’s stylish, innovative, high profile electronic devices are successfully sold at these minimalistic design stores albeit quite functional and user-friendly, where armies of employees (so-called geniuses) are available to patiently serve customers with answers to questions and other assistance.
The New Sales Store concept
Conform such intentions and purposes, Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia (IBV), the Made4U Work Package
2 leader, has developed a new concept of the Made4U “Sales Store”. The new concept will yield an original buying experience for customers, whereby the end-user becomes the co-designer, and therefore he/she actively participates in the frame production process. Via end-user participation, the sales process of eyewear objects, being in fact products, will ultimately turn into the rendering of rather exclusive services. It is also expected that customers, who have been involved in the design process as much, will typically develop a tight ‘emotional connection’ to their personalized eyewear.
IBV distinguishes six phases in the new store concept: Online pre-selection, in-store welcome, selection, user measurements, sensory evaluation, and product delivery.
1. Online Preselection
Customers will typically visit a Made4U certified optician’s webpage to preselect online a few frame designs. Registration of user profile data will allow linking customers to those preselected frames that can be shown to them during a visit to the store at a later moment. Explanatory information and multimedia showcases about frame designs should accompany their online display; as an example, user-friendly and rich content could be provided about end-user physiognomies that would ideally fit various frame shapes (per the general rules of the Tipheret Optomorphism ® method).
2. In-store Welcome
In-store welcome could materialize via customer interaction with a human agent (optician) or a variety of virtual advisors (avatars). Both, agents and avatars, will guide customers in every step of the frame selection process. During this phase, customers should be able to spend as much time necessary, and should be allowed to wonder around the shop and try-on various frames before arriving at a few preferred shortlisted designs.
3. Selection
In this stage, the customer’s face is scanned with specialized scanning equipment (anthropometric measurements) and the scanned images are virtually reproduced on a monitor. Based on the image display, a co-design software system provides hints and aesthetic suitability advice about the selected frame designs. Online simulations with those frames superimposed upon virtual representations of a user’s head and face may be also displayed – a sort of virtual try-on. In such online simulations, try-on virtual frames (fast rendered 3D models) may be further adapted to a user’s personal preferences (shape, colour, decoration, etc.)
4. User measurements
Optometric measurements to define corrective prescriptions are taken during this phase. In fact, a user’s aesthetic measurements (phase 3) are kept consciously separate from his/her optometric measurements (correction prescriptions). One reason may be the fact that, as a matter of practice in many countries, quite a few customers visit and receive their corrective prescriptions from ophthalmologists.
5. Sensory Evaluation
In this final co-design phase, users are left alone to make definitive decisions. In online monitors they visualize themselves in various contexts, situations, facial expressions, etc., and they can further try on more virtual variants of their selected frames. They can even share their impressions in real time with family and friends via the Internet, and can see, touch, and feel real samples of their frames of choice to better appreciate their physical and material properties (colour, surface, weight, flexibility, rigidness, etc.)
6. Product Delivery
Customers would naturally prefer to have their spectacles delivered to them very soon after the buying co-design process. It might be realistic to assume that in the not too distant future improved laser sintering equipment with much faster manufacturing speeds than today’s practice will start appearing at opticians’ shops as personalized frame cutters. Fast delivery of new pairs of Made4U spectacles could then become a reality. In the meantime however, and for all sorts of supply chain economics related to the inefficiencies and costs of manufacturing lines, the production of personalized spectacles may be expected to occur within delivery times rather ‘typical’ for the rest of the industry.
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