Built for how engineers actually buy.

Cognex needed two sites: cognex.com for sales and the MyCognex portal to help customers keep things running. Both were hard to navigate, and support felt it: engineers looking for a datasheet or a drawing often ended up opening a ticket. The redesign had to make a large, technical catalog easy to find. Both sites are live, and the support hub shipped essentially one-to-one with the tested design.

We began with research, not assumptions. Three phases of moderated testing, discovery interviews, high-fidelity prototype tests and a live-site survey, ran about twelve 30-minute sessions per topic, in English, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean, with most participants in Asia. Before showing a single Cognex screen, we watched people find documents on Dell and Honda support sites, and used what we saw in the wireframes.

The pattern repeated in every language. Users went straight to the search bar and typed a model number like “DM375,” and judged us by the results. Most skipped the navigation we had worked hardest on, and few used the left-hand filters. So search moved from a box to the primary way in, with model-number autocomplete. We kept and improved the mega-nav for people who browse.

Because few people used filters, the Product Finder walks users step by step from product type to the exact download. It shows the file type and size before the click, since engineers pull large CAD and firmware files over industrial connections, and includes a way to find discontinued products. This is a live, working version. Pick a category and try it.

The main tasks were finding documentation and drawings, so on complex product and application pages the support options come first: contact sales, download the data sheet, view product support, with a sticky jump-to navigation. Applications are organized two ways, by function and by industry, matching how people actually think.

Users had called the old account profile “wasted space,” so the MyCognex hub now opens with a search and adapts to who is signed in: registered products, open cases and favorites for members, popular and recent resources for everyone else. Behind it is a real account system with teams, permissions, notifications and threaded cases.

The visual language took its cue from how machine vision reads beams of light as color gradients: a subtle gradient system over black, white and Cognex yellow, and a geometric, technical sans-serif in place of Arial. We designed for three kinds of users, people new to the category, moderate users and automation experts, and tested depth, flatness and how a yellow call to action reads against gray with real client feedback. The approved direction was client-signed on 07.11.2024.

We also prototyped an assistant, ai12z, for vague queries like “I bought one but can’t remember the name,” so users don’t need a perfect search term. It was one route among trusted alternatives, never a forced funnel, because for technical users trust means always offering a way to a human. I scope this as an exploration that reached production design and the contact flow, not a confirmed live feature.