Legrand India - A Success Story
Legrand India is the market leader in India for low voltage products, and is the Indian subsidiary of the globally present Legrand group. Traditionally, Legrand prints a very high quality and easy to use product catalogue which runs into several hundred pages. These are distributed to their stockists and resellers for easy reference. However, this catalogue is inconvenient for their sales force to carry around. Legrand also wanted to distribute its product catalogue to builders, architects and interior designers in a form that was handy and could be updated frequently and cost-effectively.
Our Role
Since the catalogue was now to be put onto a CD-ROM, it opened up a host of possibilities which couldn’t be achieved on traditional non-interactive mediums. Keeping with prevailing trends of the time, a short introduction animation would play at the launch of the CD-ROM. In addition, several calculation utilities were programmed into the application to make it useful for architects and electrical engineers. Finally, a searchable contacts database was added in an attempt to make users keep the CD handy to access their contacts.
Branding Goals
Legrand has a very mature brand image and the company is very particular about following guidelines while designing any collateral. We were asked to study their brand guidelines and design the application according to that.
Though Legrand has detailed documentation on the use of their brand, it is all done for use in print. The playing field changes a little in interactive media, such as the most user friendly placement of the logo on a screen. This was where our expertise in understanding brands came to good use - in translating a company’s branding from print to digital without compromising it. The guidelines we laid down were included in the company’s internal branding guideline documentation, further enhancing the value of our services.
Navigation Goals
The catalogue featured thousands of products, while the only brief given was to make it as intuitive and user friendly as possible.
Legrand already had worked on the information architecture of their product catalogues over the years which their customers were used to. Since we were aiming for a user friendly method of navigation, we replicated the navigation used in their catalogue. This method of navigation would be used by users who were looking for a product by the category it belonged to.
Another set of customers the company wanted to cater to was those who knew their products so well that they would know their code numbers. Since we were working with an interactive digital application, we built in an easy to use search tool that the user had to only type in the first couple of characters of the code and the application would throw up a list of products that matched. All products had an associated document in Adobe’s Acrobat format which contained details of the product and which could be launched from within the application interface.