In early 2013, I received a call from one of the salesmen I had made acquaintances with after Perficient acquired us in the summer of 2012. Canon USA came to our booth at an IBM conference and asked about our portfolio. Of course, we had one, but alternatively, I recommended that he share two case studies, my email, and work on setting up a call to learn more about one another. After multiple conversations and in-person meetings, we secured an MSA.
While Canon USA (https://usa.canon.com) was interested in a complete overhaul of their website, they were also heavily invested in and at the start of an enormous rebrand with Gray Advertising. While they decided to forego the work for a year, we started on a similar project with Canon Business Solutions and half a dozen smaller projects in the meantime.
Come Winter 2013, I worked closely with Canon USA stakeholders to scope, estimate, pitch, and win the $1M discovery and framing work for USA.Canon.com, which we would kick off shortly after.
Our greatest challenge was the sheer size of everything. We had 10x the business stakeholders, 3x the project team, and 50% the timeline.
From a practical perspective, Canon’s website and supporting operations were abysmal as they often were around that timeframe, considering the site was over 10 years old, riddled with microsites, and did not have centralized content.
Organizationally, the content was difficult to find, lacked a clear message, was heavily product-driven, and was ineffective at capturing leads.
Aesthetically, the visuals were unappealing, conservative at best, and counter to Canon’s industry-leading reputation and innovative capabilities. The website user experience and product customer experience could not have been more disparate.
The site did not market well to younger demographics either. It was inaccessible across most devices and platforms and did not offer a way to really purchase products; it was more of a knowledge base.
Early on, we had many project planning sessions, a variety of stakeholder workshops, and customer research reviews. Those parlayed into concentrated research efforts of our own, from business unit focus groups and user research to persona delineation and journey mapping.
From there, we began defining new content strategies, information architecture, and functional design for the site. We then got creative with theme development, concept ideation, and rapid prototyping related to core product and service sections.
At every turn, our team held stakeholder demos, feedback forums, and post-mortems to continually learn what was working and what was not and validate decisions on work-in-progress, deliverables, and other related change management issues. Periodically, we also conducted executive demos
At the end of our 16 weeks and over 8,000 hours spent on discovery and design, we had approval on our contracted deliverables, including a proposal for our implementation scope of work to follow.
During that time between our defined strategy plans, final designs, and interactive prototypes, Canon had:
- Thinned the veils between internal departments and streamlined communications
- Committed to a copywriting agreement to reposition existing content and write new, customer-focused material promoting value and benefits for products and services more than technical and functional terms as before
- Improved site engagement tenfold by simplifying the user experience by grouping content logically, better cross-referencing, and improved wayfinding.
- Integrated a new shopping experience for customers and a first-time, effective online revenue stream for Canon
- Appealing visuals throughout the site, allowing customers to discover new products through interactive and personalized site experiences seamlessly across devices and platforms, including user-friendly support at every level
- Adobe Analytics for monitoring the front-end experience and IBM WebSphere for the back end and infrastructure; they were set up for a successful launch in 201