Please check the German section for the full article (english will follow).
Please find the official Press Release (German) here: Medienmitteilung Basel Tourismus 15. Mai 2012

As a quality leader, Eurocentres is committed to systematic and personalized language tuition, ensuring learning success and provide highly personalized services. Eurocentres has enjoyed consultative status with the Council of Europe for language learning since 1968 and has played a crucial role in the development of the Common European Framework of Reference for language teaching and learning.

The Project

The previous website www.eurocentres.com and other micro sites were outdated in terms of usability and design. It was hard to find the relevant information and to enroll online. The content administration of the worldwide websites in the multi-cultural, multi-language and multi-currency environment was becoming too complicated and took too much time.

The goal of the project was to implement a state-of-the-art web experience, which fulfills the needs of the Eurocentres target groups. The new website had to be user-friendly and cross-cultural, utilizing the latest trends in the Internet industry (e.g. mashups, Ajax, social media).

The major need was to increase the online sales. Therefore, the new online booking solution had to be intuitive, featuring faceted search and seamless integration of a multi-currency web shop. One stop shopping was another key element. Eurocentres wanted to encourage prospective clients not only to buy the language course but also appropriate accommodations, private lessons, insurance and airport transfers.

Another requirement was the extranet for language travel agents. They had to be able to easily download media files such as documents and images. Finally, integration of a media asset management system with role and time-restricted access had to be implemented.

Thinking about SEO and SEM, the new website had to be optimized by utilizing the latest techniques to ensure a high-class ranking in search engines. Special attention had to be given to target specific markets, countries and languages.

Eurocentres was looking for an experienced web agency, able to handle complex development tasks combined with great user experience and design competence. After an intensive RFQ phase and pitch, Eurocentres chose Cando Image GmbH (Cando) for this challenging project.

Cando was responsible for the entire project and developed the concept, user-experience design (UX- and IX), visual design, prototype, development and implementation.

Requirements

• Modern design with strong focus on user-experience (UX and IX).
• Faceted Search for language courses with instant results (indexing over 175′000 product items).
• Online Booking for language courses at schools and one-stop booking of accommodations and travel insurance along with the chosen course.
• Multi-currency handling without currency conversion but fixed prices in multiple currencies per product. Currency detection for certain client-country and school-location combinations.
• Sophisticated business logic for date-based products (courses, accommodations) similar to travel portals, such as handling of price periods, high season and other fees depending on the course-date, duration and destination.
• Ajax based shopping cart with convenient basket overview and possibility to change and update the cart content at one place. Easy up- and cross-selling (i.e. for private lessons and insurance).
• Agent intranet and media asset management
• Multilanguage capability for 8 languages including Japanese and Korean.
  Translation workflow and tools for editors and translation agencies.
• SEO for heterogeneous environment including different target markets, countries and language aspects
• Migration and interface development for product, price, content and image import

User Experience Design

Cando has a strong focus on design and user-experience. In terms of Eurocentres, users should be enthusiastic to search for language courses and finally guided through the enrollment process. Therefore, the concept phase included a clickable prototype (done with Axure RP) and many different visual design samples. To ensure an outstanding user-experience, end-users and all stakeholders of Eurocentres including sales, marketing and the enrollment office, were involved from the beginning. For example, holding workshops with students in the UK brought valuable feedback at an early project stage.

Content Management System (CMS) and Development

Our development team decided to implement the new Eurocentres portal based on the latest Drupal open source framework. Drupal 7 core was not even in alpha stage at time when the project started. But looking back, we have to say it was the right choice to go with the next major release. What followed was almost nine months of hard work of development, also porting modules to Drupal 7. At the same time we had to write custom code for the specific and complex business cases.

Another key factor was the e-commerce topic. Because the online booking part had to be fully integrated into the CMS system, we decided to implement the new Drupal Commerce shop system. Candos core developer also contributed to the successful Drupal 7 and Drupal Commerce release. This work will continue because Cando believes in active open source development.

Customer: Eurocentres – language learning worldwide
Keywords: CMS, Shop, E-Business, E-Commerce, UX-, IX Design, Wireframes, Prototype, Visual Design
Technology: Open Source CMS Drupal 7, Drupal Commerce, AJAX, Apache Solr, LAMP stack

Our partner futureLAB was responsible for the technical implementation in the area of online photo- and media management. Cando supported Swisscom from the beginning of the project, mainly in the photo experience concept phase and later on by creating wireframes and screen designs for the online photo part including the web album, slideshow and coverflow components.

Customer: Swisscom Schweiz AG
Partner: futureLAB
Keywords: Interaction Design, Screen Design, Wireframes, GUI, Concepts, Wizards
Technology: Open Source, AJAX, Ext JS, Flash, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop

Under the brand ASUKABOOK Europe, more than 26 countries and several distributors are served by the new system. The state-of-the art e-business solution covers complex business processes from production to end-user self care, reflecting the multi-language, multi-currency and multi-vendor environment. Especially the EU specific regulations with its tax and VAT requirements for both business and consumer clients, was a challenge when implementing the shop part.

The new solution replaced the former US system, which was not suited well for the complexity and needs of the European market. Since 2008 the new ASUKABOOK Europe websites and e-business platform is running smoothly and grows continuously.

Customer: Asukanet Co. Ltd.
Keywords: Website CMS, E-Business Solution, E-Shop, Production Interface, Finance Interface, Marketing Tools, Translation Tools, Multivendor Support (whitelabling),
Technology: Custom Development, Open Source, PHP, mySQL, AJAX, Flash

An ant-size chip makes all this possible: Mounted directly into the devices or in an adapter plug, it lets the devices communicate with one another. The system works over the existing 230 V mains. Installation only takes a few easy steps. digitalSTROM devices mediate between power generation and power consumption. Our partner futureLAB is actively involved in the digitalSTORM® software development. Cando created prototypes for widgets, mainly to control devices and to display consumption statistics (metering). The widgets where implemented on Mac OS using the Dashboard for Mac and will be running on futureLAB’s own widget container called “Kastellan” in the future.

Customer: futureLAB AG
Keywords: digitalSTROM, Widgets, Dashboard, GUI, Screen Design
Technology: X-Code, Dashcode, Adobe Photoshop