Zambon is a chemical-pharmaceutical multinational founded in Vicenza in 1906, on the history of an innovative Italian family business. Strengthened by its values, today it is a company projected towards the future whose growth project is based on innovation.
Development of an entire ecosystem of web products to support the ongoing Digital Transformation, in a future-proof and multi-cloud perspective.
Zambon wanted to embark on a transformation process that involved all web products.
With 24 sites, national domains structured differently for each country and a digital identity diluted by non-organic design approaches, the first need was to define a univocal and shared image of the Group.
The design work had as its objective the creation of a single Design System, which would allow:
The foundations of the project were laid at the same time as the creation of a multidisciplinary team, made up of the internal Zambon team (Communication and Digital Strategy) and vertical teams on specific skills and expertise: Insana (project governance, web & graphic design, content management), Sketchin (UX and information architecture) and SparkFabrik (tech development and cloud infrastructure). These realities have supported the people of the Company as strategic partners in the various phases of the project (Discovery, Design, Development and Delivery).
As SparkFabrik, we had the task of developing 16 sites, with a common publishing platform, and bringing them to the Cloud.
From these workshops a Design System was born for the generation of a modular information Architecture, to convey semantically similar information in a coherent way.
On the SparkFabrik side, we wanted to exploit this Design System, making it the starting point for the development of a flexible architecture, capable of responding to specifications in constant refinement. We therefore deviated from the more traditional approach of using a CMS, avoiding rigid and complex data structures. Instead, we took advantage of Drupal as an advanced framework and created a catalog of modular components, which allowed editors to compose pages simply by choosing the most suitable modules each time.
This approach has also allowed us to respond easily to all the new needs that have emerged during the content creation phase by the client.
Developing a new component or making changes to an existing one did not involve reorganizing entire data structures. Similarly, once the UI to be delivered to the editors has been defined in the first instance, the addition or modification of components in the future would not have involved substantial changes to the UX.
At the end of an initial development cycle, most of the information pages could be structured with the available components, thus being able to parallelize the content insertion phase and the development of components dedicated to more specific pages, considerably speeding up the population of the site.
With the new Corporate site, Zambon was therefore able to merge the content of 24 different websites into a single container, organic and coherent, which narrates the corporate identity in its entirety. The internal team was able to manage the creation of new content in complete autonomy, with the freedom to be able to request changes or additions at any time. Each new component is released in Continuous Integration and the user experience of the editors does not undergo substantial changes.
Furthermore, thanks to the deploy system, each update is released automatically on each site and each new feature is immediately available on all the others.
The Design System brought such benefits in terms of content development and management, that it was considered as a future solution for sites focused on single Zambon products. To respond to specific communication needs, the catalog will be enriched with new modules that will allow individual editorial teams to create unique sites that are at the same time consistent with the Group’s image.
Zambon represented a challenge in terms of technology, both in terms of development and management of Cloud infrastructures. It led us to look for alternative and more efficient schemes, to avoid building a structure that is too complex to be governed and maintained.
Digital Transformation & Service Design Strategist, Zambon Company
Head of Digital Strategy, Zambon Company
