Canon Asia
Relaunching and unifying a juggernaut across Asia Pacific
Platform strategy
Design System
Responsive design
Role : Executive Creative Director APAC
Ask anyone and it’s likely that they, or a family member, own a Canon product. The Japanese company has come a long way since 1934, expanding into countless consumer and industry-grade optical solution products.
As Canon grew into every market, each owned and operated its own digital presence.
They differed substantially in structure, tonality and design. Additionally, most of the content was static HTML.
And with thousands of products this created a challenge for brand consistency, customer comprehension and internal operations.
A simpler, streamlined and unified solution was becoming necessary.
APAC market websites were inconsistent and partly off brand
Planning the cross-regional process
The goal was an experience with minimal friction on every device, standardised across the entire APAC region. To add to the challenge, Canon needed a change faster than the scale of the relaunch allowed.
This meant we had to divide it into phases and incrementally revamp the experience while keeping all functionality available in the interim. To be sure we addressed the problems in the right way, we designed our process in an agile manner with many early prototyping cycles.
Phase 1
CMS & research
Integration of all 20,000 pages into a dynamic CMS and qual/quant research on early design solutions
Phase 2
Key pages
Relaunch of first landing page and first 2 levels of content pages
Phase 3
Secondary pages
Relaunch of all other pages
Phase 4
Regional adaptation
Localisation and sequential rollout to all APAC markets
Targeting the every-persona persona
When analysing the regional websites and researching what visitors wanted to see, one of the largest challenges became apparent - The audience couldn’t have been more diverse:
the every-day consumer looking for a simple point-and-shoot or photo printer
professional photographers and broadcasters seeking systemic solutions
enterprise clients with large production printing systems
medical providers
the press
Each was looking for entirely different products, service offerings, software downloads or business solutions.
Canon only wanted one URL and one landing page, so we had to find a way to address the different groups at the same time.
In order to determine the right content split, we translated the high level result of the research into percentages and applied these to the first structural wireframes. In a second step we defined the split between regional and local content areas.
High level content allocation
Tangible allocation with regional and local content areas
Finding the right needle in the product haystack
With the overall allocation in place we set up the platform’s architecture to match the most prevalent use case: ‘I want to find [information/data/downloads] to a specific [product/service/initiative]’.
Focussing on the utility of finding details to products already familiar and not browsing/discovering products, we decided to give specific attention to search, comparison and minute details of products themselves.
Product Finder, product comparison and product detail page
The details are not the details.
The details are what people come for.
One thing common to the entire audience was the desire for as much minute information as possible. Technical specs, development background, compatibilities and after sales options were in the centre of attention.
People saw Canon as a hub for fundamental research and the only credible authority for such information.
Important products, such as cameras, therefore received their own product world type of landing pages with many sub-levels, specs, references and downloads for complete immersion.
Powered by a fast and flexible CMS, all local markets were now able to use regional and local content, adapt it to their needs and publish frequently with minimal effort while the customer experience met the scale and depth of the global brand that Canon is.
