GEA, one of the world’s largest suppliers for food processing, has worked closely together with Make® to deliver an ambitious restructuring and refreshed online experience for gea.com. Faced with an organizational restructuring and increasing customer demand for improved product findability and more focused industry sections, it was time to rethink GEA’s website resulting in dedicated universes with the flexibility to target their communication, products, and services to specific markets.
Make® has partnered with the German technology group since 2015, where we delivered the first version of the group’s B2B website. GEA works across many industries and specialize in technology, machinery, plants, components, and sustainable solutions for highly advanced production processes. Headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, the company operates in 50+ countries, employs 18,000 people, and generates 85% of its sales outside of Germany.
Deliverables
Digital strategy
User research
User experience design
User interface design
11
Industries
72
Markets
900+
Product pages
300K+
Monthly visitors
Open and modular interface design
The sophisticated design system of greys and blues features a clean and spacious universe in which imagery is used to both humanize and contextualise a highly complex Group that operates on many levels. Taking a modular approach to the interface design allows for an easily accessible presentation of diverse content as well as adaptation to the 10+ languages the site is available in.
GEA is one of the largest technology suppliers for food processing and a wide range of other industries.
Font system
A scalable icon set
From water bottles and tigers to agricultural biomass and oil rigs, we designed 200+ icons capturing the essence of GEA’s industries, markets, and applications. The icon set is intended for use beyond the interface design to ensure consistency and coherence across GEA’s corporate and marketing communication.
Strategy backed by research
Strategic insights were generated from a series of workshops across GEA’s divisions, online customer feedback, and usability tests on structure and flow to inform changes to GEA’s complex taxonomy – the backbone of the new site’s structure. With carefully planned user journeys in place, we elaborated the tagging framework allowing content to be continuously adapted for users as they move through the site offering a relevant and intuitive online experience from start to finish.
”The refreshed GEA.com is highly customer-centric and has improved the user experience with an intuitive and appealing interface. At the same time, it enables internal agility and shared content ownership.”
Davy Moortgat, Online Manager
A floating structure
To structure and organize GEA’s vast product portfolio, we created a taxonomy to ensure product findability across markets and industries. The taxonomy enables the presentation of products in relevant contexts across the site.