Light Finder for ERCO

Our long-standing partner, ERCO Leuchten GmbH, commissioned us to develop the Light Finder, an interactive tool that helps users on ERCO.com navigate through the company's comprehensive product range and specifically select lighting solutions for their individual requirements. As a global manufacturer of high-quality architectural lighting, ERCO offers a broad product range of over 80,000 items. The central goal of the project was to promote user "self-empowerment": They should be able to independently find the right lighting product for their needs without in-depth technical knowledge.

In close coordination with ERCO, we aimed to develop a solution that guides lighting enthusiasts through the extensive range of lighting tools. A key challenge was to present complex lighting solutions in a way that allows users without specific lighting design knowledge to make the right selection. At the same time, ERCO wanted to use the Light Finder to support its sales team by having the tool provide initial product selection consultation and enabling interested parties to make an informed pre-selection.

During the conception phase, we decided on a solution that enables users to describe their lighting task in detail. Based on this information, the product selection is gradually narrowed down. Users are guided through the GUI by simple, illustrative drawings that visualize various lighting situations. Guided in this way, they answer four to five questions about their specific lighting task in a cascading questionnaire, progressively narrowing down the product variety until reaching the optimal product selection.

The Light Finder operates with a question tree that dynamically adjusts the product selection. This approach makes it possible to continuously narrow down the number of items and present users with the ideal selection of products. For the technical implementation, we relied on a pre-calculated XML structure that ensures fast loading times and a smooth user experience. This generated substantial amounts of data, which also presented the technical challenge of adapting to ERCO's innovation cycle, allowing new products and updates to be regularly integrated into the XML database.

After the launch, it became apparent that additional educational content offered in the Light Finder was rarely accessed by users, leading to the removal of this extension and thus strengthening the tool for its core task. In the course of a fundamental product range update, the Light Finder was temporarily taken offline. Currently, we are examining and testing to what extent a new AI-based solution can be implemented to provide even stronger support for the goal of user self-empowerment.