Lightware designs and manufactures precision video signal management products for high-end applications across various industries. With over 25 years of experience, Lightware has 18 offices worldwide, and their products are present in more than 30 countries. They support customers in multiple verticals such as Corporate, Education, Medical, Defense, E-sports, and Live Events.

Lightware faced several challenges with their existing website:

• Technical and User-Experience Issues: The existing site was slow, negatively impacting SEO and customer experience.
• Global Growth: The on-premise server farm in the EU could not support Lightware's global presence, leading to performance issues.
• Complex Content Structure: The growing product portfolio made it difficult for users to find products and information.
• Outdated CMS: The existing CMS was outdated, hard to develop, and limited Lightware's ability to manage localized and multilingual content.
• Lack of Direct Customer Access: Users could not see important product data like regional prices, and Lightware had no direct access to active customers through the website.

Lightware chose SnapSoft for its professional excellence and digital product development experience. SnapSoft's data-driven approach and comprehensive service offerings, including a solution architect, product manager, and UX consultant, enabled a holistic handling of technical, business, and user aspects. SnapSoft not only develops solutions but ensures they address end-user needs and business pain points.

AWS was chosen for its ability to create a quick, scalable and globally accessible site, aligning with Lightware’s business requirements. SnapSoft’s AWS architects designed a serverless cloud architecture, providing cost estimates and ensuring the infrastructure supported Lightware’s global presence efficiently.

SnapSoft employed a design thinking methodology using the double-diamond framework. The project began with a 3-hour strategy workshop to discuss the product vision and set objectives, followed by a discovery process involving nine workshops with different departments over three months. Key Activities:

• Problem Statements: Identified user and internal pain points using Google Analytics data.
• User Personas: Defined target user profiles.
• Product Market Fit Pyramid: Established to ensure alignment with market needs.
• User Journey Mapping: Synthesized data to create a clear user journey and feature list with integration mapping. The proposal included modernizing the current website infrastructure to create better end-user experiences and facilitate internal process development. The proposed product aimed to deliver an extended web experience with a user-centric design, enhanced functionality, based on the following business values:

For Lightware’s Customers:

• Advanced search functionality and product wizard
• Globally accessible, SEO-optimized site
• Implement Partner portal with enhanced product management features for instance product prices, project management and request a quote for projects.

For Lightware:

• Automated customer inquiries through enhanced sales processes
• Fast customer support with SalesForce integration
• Easily manageable multilingual content management system

The project concluded with a clarified roadmap featuring a finalized serverless AWS architecture and top-tier frameworks like Next.js, Amplify, and a self-hosted Strapi headless CMS with custom implementation. The iterative consultation process with Lightware experts ensured the best-fit solution was achieved. Outcomes included a UX design phase where we restructured information architecture and wireframes, end-user validation through clickable prototypes for usability testing, pixel-perfect UI design based on usability and feedback, and a technical proof-of-concept with a limited scope to inform the final website rebuild. The benefits of this process included ongoing decision-making involvement for Lightware and the integration of expert and end-user feedback, resulting in a robust, user-friendly, and globally accessible website aligned with Lightware's business growth and customer needs.