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 iGuzzini
iGuzzini Illuminazione is an Italian architectural lighting company founded in 1959. Over six decades, its products have illuminated some of the world’s most recognised spaces — the Colosseum, the Louvre, Heathrow Airport, the Beijing National Stadium.
With over 1,400 employees and distribution across 50+ countries, iGuzzini sits at the intersection of design culture, engineering precision, and sustainability. The company works with architects, lighting designers, and facility managers worldwide — and its digital infrastructure had not kept pace with either its brand evolution or its users’ professional workflows.
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 for a fixed CMS migration window — Optimizely, July to September 2024. 2 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 proper digital tool for more than three years, our goal was to bring clarity, consistency, and purpose back into the experience. Our approach focused on understanding the gaps, redefining structure and narrative, and shaping a solution that could finally go live within the required July–September 2024 window.
Phases
1. Preliminary Analysis
Codesign meetings with the aim of identifying the key pages to be designed in the
subsequent phases and to bring out the requirements of each page to be redesigned.
2. UX Design
Formalization of the information architecture, definition of the user experience and
design of the templates based on the requirements that emerged during the preliminary analysis.
3. UI Design
Formalization of the UI concept, declination of the concept in the pages defined during the
preliminary analysis and designed on wireframes from the previous phase.
3. Hand off
Sharing of the approved design with the development team through 3 meetings, one
after each delivered design batch.
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 of the iGuzzini website, I developed a comprehensive research plan aimed at understanding users’ needs, behaviors, 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 important questions in product design is: Who are we designing for? Without understanding who will use the product, it is impossible to make it successful. Although there are numerous tools available to product designers for gathering insightful data about users and their behavior, one of the most useful techniques that can enhance practically every web design project is the development of a user persona.
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 workshop with a daily cadence.
During these group activities we took in analysis the current website, the staging website and we defined the new needs for each section, outlining then the new features and characteristics for each page.
The totality of the workshops took 2 weeks approximately and was led in Figma Jam completely remotely.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 baked into every navigation decision on the existing site.
Information architeture
The information architecture was defined in 3 workshop sessions with the client side stakeholders
where we analysed the live website and we listed the wishes for the new information of architecture trying to guide the user through the choices of IA and organisation of the content.
Wireframes
To create the wireframes we adopted the ‘Modules’ approach. We first identified all the recurring modules that are part of the various sections of the website.
We then recreated in an organised way the modules and components that could solve all the needs of the various parts.
In this way, being a CMS, the modules will be repeated across the website instead of being hardcoded, this will save a lot of time and effort in development.
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
Following a series of some of the components that are part of the design system which mapped all the modules needed to compose the different pages.
All the components follow the 8px grid and the recommendations are written aside.
Mobile
The application is conceived as responsive and mobile is becoming more more important target in the website traffic. Here below a series of mobile mockups I created for this portal.
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 alignment with the updated 2022 brand strategy, ensuring a digital presence that finally reflects the company’s leadership in architectural lighting.
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.