Black Box

The Black Box internal IT team selected Endeca to provide back-end, catalog based e-commerce functionality for their corporate website. After the acquisition of ACS Communications, Black Box needed to re-invent the information architecture of their site to utilize Endeca and include a broad range of new products and price points while creating the appropriate experience for a new customer base.

We invested heavily in learning the Endeca product offering and developed a clear understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. We worked jointly with Black Box IT and business stake holders to design a clear information hierarchy that presents the value added network solutions Black Box provides as well as the 100,000+ products present in their eCommerce catalog.

Black Box needed to re-imagine its brand and execute a new eCommerce user experience after the purchase of ACS Communications. There were new customer value propositions that needed to be considered, emerging markets that needed to be integrated and a new technology infrastructure that provided a whole new set of capabilities. Black Box has over 100,000 products in its eCommerce catalog which presented a tremendous content creation challenge for Black Box and one that necessitated a visual design that didn't require the creation of dozens of new assets per SKU. In addition, Black Box provides a large printed catalog that needed to be considered as we evolved the brand and the user experience.

We designed a clean, corporate brand for Black Box designed to serve a broad range of customer groups, the Fortune 500, small to medium businesses with an IT department and tech-savvy consumers. The visual experience and user interaction models were designed to expedite the search, browse and transact capabilities of their eCommerce store and present a professional presentation of the network solution services they acquired through the purchase of ACS Communications.

Finally, our development team stepped in to write the front-end code on top of Endeca.

With the selection of Endeca as a platform for delivering the new catalog, we worked with BlackBox and Endeca to convert the 100,000+ product catalog from an organically grown catalog to a structured hierarchical catalog, where products were mapped to logical and audience-familiar groupings.

With this hierarchy, we designed and developed a user experience for the catalog that combined an intuitive navigation with the Endeca search functionality and a set of easy to read page types for delivering content to the user.