New Website Search with Elasticsearch

In close collaboration with ERCO’s marketing department, we completely redesigned the website search on erco.com to meet user requirements and expectations while making high-quality content more accessible. As a global manufacturer of high-quality architectural lighting, ERCO offers an extensive product range on its website as well as in-depth technical content on lighting planning and technology. Our goal was to significantly simplify and expand access to this information.

The previous search on erco.com was technologically and functionally limited. It had a very restricted search scope and only allowed searching through page headlines. A true full-text search that made the website’s content comprehensively accessible was missing. Therefore, our goal was to expand the “search space” and provide users with improved access to the content.

To make the search future-proof and performant, we relied on Elasticsearch, a high-performance state-of-the-art search technology. At the start of the project, Elasticsearch was already in use in other parts of ERCO’s web infrastructure. This technology allowed us to efficiently index extensive data and offer features such as faceted search results, where results can be displayed aggregated by categories.

For the design of the user interface, we decided to adopt familiar design patterns known from major search engines like Google and Bing. This allows users to quickly orient themselves and utilize learned search paths without having to learn new interaction methods. This is particularly evident in the design of the search results display, where we use category buttons that show associated result sets.

In an agile process, we worked with functional models to test prototypes of the new search with real data and discuss them in meetings with the ERCO team. This allowed us to incorporate early user feedback directly into the development and iteratively improve the solution. This approach led to an optimized result that could be quickly put into production and made available to users on erco.com.

The new website search on www.erco.com provides a comprehensive and powerful search function that captures many relevant website contents and stays current through regular index updates. The close collaboration in UI development and search rule implementation between Klickmeister and ERCO’s marketing department was crucial in developing a solution that is aligned with user needs and enables sustainable improvement of the user experience. Through continuous collection of current data on user behavior, we gather insights for the ongoing optimization process of the search, which will be incorporated into update versions.