Head­quar­tered in Paris, France and oper­at­ing in more than 30 coun­tries, Capgem­i­ni is a glob­al con­sul­tan­cy that treats its blue-chip clients as col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ners. Many com­pa­nies talk about that kind of part­ner­ship, but Capgem­i­ni actu­al­ly means it.

Work­ing in tan­dem with Stopde­sign, we redesigned Capgem­in­is site to reflect the com­pa­nys com­mit­ment to col­lab­o­ra­tive partnership.

Live the brand in every detail

Col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ship was key to the com­pa­nys rebrand­ing; we took this idea to every lev­el of the site. Reflect­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ship meant pre­fer­ring nat­ur­al lan­guage to buzz­words and con­sul­tant-speakeasy to spot in some­thing as basic as the nav­i­ga­tion menu. Instead of cat­e­gories based on cor­po­rate struc­tures and sales divi­sions, we used clear, ordi­nary lan­guage to con­nect the vis­i­tors needs to the com­pa­nys services.

Innovative navigation paints a mental picture

In place of the heinous drop-down menus that users hate (but were some­what expect­ed at the time of the design), our infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture intro­duced some­thing we called spec­trum nav­i­ga­tion. You can see it in the screen­shot, and view it in action on this archived Auto­mo­tive page. As con­tent becomes more gran­u­lar, side­bar hues reflect the depth of the path as the vis­i­tor explores more deeply into spe­cif­ic top­ics. Like spark-lines and progress bars, our inno­v­a­tive nav­i­ga­tion helps vis­i­tors form a men­tal mod­el of the sites archi­tec­ture and track their loca­tion with­in it.

While the spec­trum lets vis­i­tors drill up or down with a click, sib­ling link­age is han­dled con­tex­tu­al­ly. The com­bi­na­tion of spec­trum nav­i­ga­tion and con­tex­tu­al link­age is fea­tured in the main con­tent area of each page, replac­ing the pre­vi­ous sites tedious and poor­ly usable drop-down menu structure.

Like­wise, the open, spa­cious visu­al design allows vis­i­tors to scan or dive into a tremen­dous amount of data with­out clut­ter or con­fu­sion. Not only is it one of the clean­est designs in the cat­e­go­ry, it is also among the first to use stan­dards-based seman­tic XHTML and CSS lay­out, and include spe­cial fea­tures like smart type siz­ing. Choos­ing a page at ran­dom, vis­it this archived Indus­tries page and use your browsers built-in size wid­gets to make the text big­ger. As the text enlarges, so does the con­tain­er for the head­er graph­ic. The site is filled with touch­es like the­se­touch­es pre­dat­ing Respon­sive Web Design by about five yearsthat helped make the site more acces­si­ble. (Enlarg­ing type helps low-vision users; not break­ing the lay­out while doing so helps everyone.)

All this and content, too

Human-friend­ly infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and design are all well and good, but what hap­pens when mar­ket­ing begins to fill the site with copy? We cre­at­ed strict con­tent guide­lines to help Capgem­in­is in-house staff find and elim­i­nate vague­ness and buzz­words, replac­ing them with infor­mal, yet busi­nesslike, lan­guage that rein­forces the com­pa­nys empha­sis on true col­lab­o­ra­tive partnership.

(In a sub­se­quent con­tent engage­ment, Capgem­i­ni request­ed our help cre­at­ing page after page of copy their plain-speak­ing brand requires. Yes, we do that, too.)

Last but not least, we designed and built a pow­er­ful and ver­sa­tile cus­tom con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for the new site. Pow­ered by PHP and housed on low-cost, reli­able Unix servers, the sys­tem did every­thing a mod­ern CMS should do. It includ­ed such niceties as con­tex­tu­al help, and sup­port­ed the sites sophis­ti­cat­ed use of web standards.

Our responsibilities on this project

Bri­an Alvey designed the cus­tom back-end sys­tem. We, along with Stopde­sign, con­duct­ed research, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; graph­ic design; user inter­face design; user expe­ri­ence design; edi­to­r­i­al con­sult­ing; con­tent guide­line devel­op­ment; con­tent strat­e­gy; writ­ing; edit­ing; style guide devel­op­ment; CSS/HTML tem­plate devel­op­ment. Launched 17 May 2005.

Need­less to say, Capgem­i­ni has redesigned sev­er­al times since then, but you can get a par­tial glimpse of our beau­ti­ful work by vis­it­ing the archived site.