Introduction

The previous Canon website was many years out of date and needed to be responsively redesigned. This was an opportunity to review how the existing online presence was performing and to better align to the evolving needs of Canon’s customer base. Focusing our efforts to prioritise certain segmentations, the redesigned site was intended to better serve professional photographers and IT managers who look to their online presence for inspiration and detailed product information.

The Problem

Whilst Canon is a market leader in many of the sectors they serve, customers often overlooked their website when looking for more detailed information on the capabilities of their products. A large majority of these customers would look to third-party sites where information wasn’t always accurate or kept up-to-date. The perception of their existing site being ‘dated’ and ‘not fitting to a market leader’ often lead to a change in customer perception of the company and their position within the market.

Some customers also highlighted difficulties in after sales support when they were unable to properly configure their equipment. This often leading to customers taking to customer support telephone numbers which took a great deal of time, customer inconvenience and huge cost to manage support channels sufficiently.

Leading a Team of Talented Designers

As the UX lead, it was my role to manage a team of talented designers through out the design process. As the project was set to an extremely tight deadline it meant I had to manage the time we had efficiently so that the team could work effectively in line with the needs of research, product management, front-end development and back-end engineering. This was done by breaking activities into 1 week sprints, where UX and UI design would work one week behind research but also one week ahead of development team.

Taking The Whole Team For The Ride

As the timeframe for the project was ambitious, it was important that the whole team (designers, research, development, product, project management, etc) took the design journey with us. I felt it was important that the whole team knew the design challenges we faced and the reasoning for the approach taken. It was also important that the whole team had a voice in what they felt would be a good design idea and where they felt improvements could be made. This made for an easier transition from design to research and development.

Axure Prototypes

So that we could validate design approaches before going into development, interactive prototypes were created using Axure. By testing core user journeys in this tool allowed the team to go into development with a high level of confidence.

As the project went on, more and more UI design assets were made available. This allowed final stage prototypes to have a high fidelity visual treatment.