Roca Product Catalog
Client
Roca Sanitario, HQ
Role
UX Designer & Product Manager
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Year
2016/17 (5-month Internship)
Roca Group is a leading global corporation in the design, manufacturing, and commercialization of bathroom products present in 170 countries. Its printed version of the product catalog contains approximately 1,000 pages, with over 3,000 products on sale and 125 different product types, from bathroom furniture to spare parts. Their past product catalog was constructed 10 years ago.
During my internship, I reduced the costs of catalog generation by designing a new structure that allows the catalog to be automatically generated every year from an excel database. The catalog meets the needs of the 4 targets the company works with (shop retailers, architects, installers, and end-users) and supports the information of approximately 3,000 products and 125 different product types worldwide.
The automated catalog is now being distributed in all the 170 countries Roca Group operates. Using this new system, the company saved 2 months of work per year and ~half a million euros worldwide for manual updates. Moreover, it allowed the catalog to be more accurate than ever by reducing human mistakes. Finally, the new database created for this purpose is now being used for other projects as a form of unification.
Software: Adobe InDesign
1,000 pages
3,000 products
125 product types
Steps towards automation:
1 / Two User-Flows
Technical information about a product (e.g., measurements beyond width and height) is generally irrelevant for end-users to make a purchase decision. End users care about aesthetics and price. However, architects' and product installers' needs are different, and this one catalog should meet them all. With that in mind, we split the catalog into two main blocks creating two different user journeys.
2 / Unify Product Descriptions
This was the most complex task due to the diversity of products the company sells. Each product type has its own description requirements. The task here was to understand what is a necessary piece of information to communicate and what is a nice-to-have for each of the audiences this catalog was directed to.
3/ Templates Creation
Finally, once defined the must-to-have information for each product type and for each stakeholder, I architected 6 different templates in InDesign that could get populated using an excel database containing all the product information.
Catalog's presentation at the European Marketing Meeting for Roca Sanitario. Auditorium Disseny Hub Barcelona with an approximate audience of 100 people.