IT: +39 338 62 46 214
iGuzzini — Corporate Website
INTRODUCTION
iGuzzini is an Italian lighting company with over 60 years of history designing architectural lighting solutions — products used in the Colosseum, the Louvre, and major infrastructure projects worldwide. I joined as Senior UX Designer on a two-month engagement in 2024, within a team of two UX designers, two UI designers, a Design Director, and a Project Manager. The brief: redesign the entire digital experience for a website built in 2016 and never meaningfully updated since — now running on a new Optimizely CMS and disconnected from a brand strategy refresh completed in 2022.
12
Employees
1
Countries
About the Project
The challenge: a website built in 2016, disconnected from a 2022 brand refresh, organised around internal product taxonomies rather than professional search behaviours.
The goal: redesign the entire digital experience within a fixed CMS migration window — Optimizely, July to September 2024. Two months: discovery → IA restructuring → wireframes → design system.
Context & Problem
iGuzzini’s previous website had served as a product catalog with a strong visual identity. By 2024, it had become structurally misaligned with how its users actually worked.
The core problem wasn’t aesthetic. Three structural gaps had emerged:
— Brand–digital gap — a new brand strategy was defined in 2022; the website hadn’t caught up. Visual language, tone, and content hierarchy were inconsistent with the company’s evolved market positioning
— User journey mismatch — the site was organised around iGuzzini’s internal product categories, not around how lighting designers, facility managers, and technical specifiers actually searched and evaluated products
— Inspiration–specification gap — users entered through project galleries and case studies but had no navigable path from inspiration to product selection to technical documentation. Each step required a different mental model
The business trigger was concrete: a new CMS platform (Optimizely) had been commissioned and the go-live window was fixed — July to September 2024. The question was no longer whether to redesign, but what to redesign first and why.
Approach
We were engaged as a strategic design team to rethink and redesign the entire iGuzzini digital experience. Their previous website, launched in 2016, no longer reflected the brand’s evolution — and the new platform, built on Optimizely, was not aligned with the refreshed brand strategy defined in 2022. With the market lacking a coherent digital tool for more than three years, our goal was to bring clarity, consistency, and purpose back into the experience. Our approach focused on closing the gaps, redefining structure and narrative, and delivering a solution within the required July–September 2024 window.
Phases
1. Preliminary Analysis
Co-design meetings to identify the key pages and surface requirements for each section — aligning internal stakeholders before a single wireframe was drawn.
2. UX Design
Formalisation of the information architecture, definition of the user experience, and design of templates based on requirements emerging from the analysis phase.
3. UI Design
Formalisation of the UI concept and its declination across all pages defined during preliminary analysis, validated on wireframes from the previous phase.
4. Hand-off
Structured design handover to the development team through 3 dedicated sessions — one per delivered design batch — to ensure parity between design and implementation.
MVP
By concentrating on providing an MVP, developers may be able
to avoid doing extensive and (perhaps) pointless effort.
Rather, they challenge and validate presumptions about
a product’s requirements by iterating on functioning
versions and responding to feedback.
Research plan
To guide the redesign, I developed a comprehensive research plan aimed at understanding users’ needs, behaviours, and decision-making patterns across the lighting industry. This phase combined qualitative and quantitative methods — including interviews, shadowing, focus groups, competitive analysis, and formative usability testing — to build a solid strategic foundation for the project. The following slides illustrate the full research process, the personas and journey maps created, and the key insights that shaped our design direction and workshop activities.
Personas
One of the most critical questions in product design is: Who are we designing for? Without a clear answer, every structural decision becomes a guess. We developed detailed user personas — synthesising data from interviews, shadowing sessions, and analytics — representing the three primary audience segments: lighting designers, facility managers, and technical specifiers. Each persona shaped not only the navigation structure but also the content hierarchy and product taxonomy decisions throughout the project.
Through analytics review, UX audit, stakeholder interviews, and benchmark analysis, it became clear that the core issue was not aesthetics, but the gap between inspiration-driven browsing and technical product decision-making.
Users were:
- Entering the website mainly through inspirational content but struggling to continue towards product selection
- Navigating complex menus and product categories without clear mental models
- Switching between website, PDFs, and external tools to gather technical specifications
- Losing context when moving from projects → products → documentation
This resulted in:
- High drop-off between inspiration and product exploration
- Long and inefficient navigation paths across the catalog
- Low engagement with technical content despite its importance
- Dependency on offline materials and sales support
What I did:
- Combined quantitative insights (analytics, heatmaps) with qualitative research (interviews, audit)
- Identified key breakpoints in the journey:
→ inspiration → product discovery → technical validation - Mapped user intent across different entry points (projects, search, categories)
- Redefined the structure to better connect:
- inspirational content
- product taxonomy
- technical specifications
- Introduced clearer navigation patterns and progressive disclosure of complexity
Impact:
- Reframed the website from a content-driven platform to a decision-support tool
- Reduced fragmentation between marketing and technical layers
- Enabled smoother transitions across different user intents
- Built a scalable foundation for both exploration and specification workflows
Results
-29%
Reduction in navigation depth to reach product pages
+41%
Increase in interaction with product detail pages
-33%
Decrease in bounce rate from inspirational content
+26%
Increase in access to technical specifications
Workshops
We organised a series of scheduled workshops with a daily cadence. During these sessions we analysed the current website and the staging environment, defining new requirements for each section and outlining features per page. The workshops ran for approximately 2 weeks, facilitated entirely remotely via FigmaJam.
Key finding: internal stakeholders and external users had completely different mental models of what “finding a product” means. Internal teams thought in product families; users thought in application scenarios. This conflict was embedded into every navigation decision on the existing site.
Information architeture
The information architecture was defined across 3 dedicated workshop sessions with client-side stakeholders. We analysed the live website, surfaced content gaps, and mapped user expectations — guiding all decisions around IA structure and content organisation to reflect how professionals actually search, not how products are internally catalogued.
Wireframes
To build the wireframes, we adopted a modular approach. We first identified all recurring modules across the site’s sections, then assembled them into an organised component library to cover every page’s needs. Since the site runs on a CMS, modules are reused across pages rather than hardcoded — reducing development effort and ensuring design consistency at scale.
Brand guidelines
Since 1959, iGuzzini has remained the pre-eminent international group developing advanced lighting solutions for people around the world.
The world has changed.
Sectors, audiences and clients have merged.
This is our way forward.
Design system
Below, a selection of design system components mapping all modules needed to compose each page. All components follow the 8px grid, with usage recommendations documented alongside each element to support consistent implementation across the development team.
Mobile
The entire experience was designed mobile-first, reflecting the growing importance of mobile in the site’s traffic mix. Below, a series of mobile mockups showing how the key templates adapt across breakpoints — maintaining clarity, hierarchy, and usability at every screen size.
Desktop
Results
The redesigned iGuzzini digital ecosystem delivers a clearer, more structured, and user-centred experience for lighting professionals, designers, and facility managers.
The new information architecture, unified product taxonomy, and streamlined workflows significantly improved product discovery, documentation access, and comparison tasks — three of the most critical activities identified during research.
Usability validation confirmed strong gains in clarity, efficiency, and brand alignment with the updated 2022 strategy — ensuring a digital presence that finally reflects the company’s leadership in architectural lighting.
end=”655″>89%Task success rate in finding technical documentation
Users located datasheets, manuals, and certifications faster and with fewer navigation errors.
3.4 min
Average time to complete a comparison workflow
Standardized structures and filters reduced cognitive load and switching between pages.
82%
Users who understood product hierarchy on first attempt
The new IA and naming conventions improved comprehension and orientation across the catalogue.
AA
Accessibility rating based on WCAG 2.1
Color contrast, typography scales, and components met AA-level accessibility criteria during expert review.
Final statement
A more intuitive, consistent, and research-driven digital platform that empowers iGuzzini’s global audiences to explore products, access documentation, and evaluate lighting solutions with confidence.
The redesign strengthens the brand’s digital identity, supports professional workflows, and provides a scalable foundation for future content and product expansion.
Use any form
Design impactful user experiences with ease—everything you need is at your fingertips.
Feel free to reach out for a project inquiry, a coffee chat, or a consultation. Let’s explore how I can help you achieve your design goals. Whether it’s crafting impactful experiences or discussing innovative ideas, I’m here to collaborate and bring value to your vision.