Discovery
Information Architecture as a Sales Infrastructure Problem
E'kabel's catalog problem looked simple on the surface: they were using a PDF to showcase over 500 specialized cable and equipment products. It worked, until it didn't. Every product update required redistributing the file manually. Version control was a constant headache. Human errors slipped in. The process of keeping the catalog current was tedious enough that it was creating real commercial friction.
I ran several working sessions with the client to map how the catalog actually lived inside their sales process: how often it was updated, who used it, at what point in a sale it appeared, and what happened when a client asked for something that wasn't clearly covered. What came out of those sessions changed the framing of the project entirely. The catalog was not just used by technical engineers who knew cables. It was also used by procurement teams, administrative staff, and marketing departments on the client side. The tool had to be simple enough for a buyer with no cable expertise to navigate independently, while still carrying the technical depth that a specialist would expect.
Two other things became clear quickly. First, the digital catalog was not a replacement for the PDF. It was a dynamic layer that would generate on-demand PDF exports of whatever pages a client needed, combining the flexibility of digital with the familiarity of a format their clients already trusted. Second, and more importantly, the catalog was not just a support tool. It was the foundation for a future e-commerce layer, the primary lead generation surface for new clients, and a brand awareness asset in a sector where most competitors were still operating with static files.
The benchmark confirmed the direction. Across the industrial cable and equipment space, mobile apps had become table stakes. Competitors with established digital presences offered both web and mobile catalog access. That set the scope: web platform plus native apps for iOS and Android.
Design
Simplifying the Presentation Layer Without Losing Technical Depth
The design process started with a strong UX/UI partner. We worked iteratively from day one, building a moodboard that pulled from E'kabel's existing branding and from references in the industrial and B2B catalog space. The direction that emerged quickly was minimalist: a design system that made category navigation fast, kept the focus on search and product identification, and stayed out of the way of the content.
We did not start from scratch visually. E'kabel already had a catalog with established color coding, iconography, technical illustrations, and brand identity that their clients recognized. We inherited those elements deliberately, so the digital version felt like a natural extension of something familiar rather than a replacement that required relearning.
The home screen went through multiple iterations. We presented several proposals to the client and used each round of feedback to narrow down what the experience needed to prioritize. The final direction landed on something that functioned like a dashboard but felt like a catalog: structured enough to give orientation at a glance, simple enough that any user, technical or not, could find what they were looking for without assistance.
Once the home was approved, the full flow came together around that foundation. Every screen decision traced back to the same constraint: a user in a meeting, on a job site, or in a procurement office needed to find a specific product and its full technical specifications in under a minute. That constraint shaped navigation depth, filter logic, search behavior, and how product detail pages were organized.
Delivery
The Technical Launch Was Easy. The Content Migration Was Not.
The production release itself was not the hard part. The hard part was getting over 500 products out of a PDF and into a structured database. Each product in E'kabel's catalog carries a description, multiple images, a technical specifications table, compliance standards, and bilingual content in both English and Spanish. None of that was consolidated in one place. It lived across the PDF, separate image folders, and institutional knowledge distributed across teams. Extracting, structuring, and validating that content manually was the most time-intensive part of the entire delivery.
That process revealed something important about the real cost of the legacy PDF workflow. It was not just a distribution problem. It was a data architecture problem. There was no single source of truth for product information. The migration forced E'kabel to build that source of truth for the first time, which became one of the most durable operational outcomes of the project beyond the catalog itself.
On the technical side, the mobile apps were built with Expo Go, enabling a single codebase to ship to both iOS and Android without duplicating development effort. The web catalog was integrated with the main ekabel.net site, creating a consistent experience across access points. The REST API layer connecting the content backend to all three surfaces made future updates straightforward: change the product once, and it propagates everywhere simultaneously, which is exactly the operational problem the PDF workflow had made impossible.
Follow-up Post-Delivery
Smooth Launch, Then the Sales Team Had Ideas
The launch went cleanly. No major incidents, no rollbacks. What followed immediately after was a steady stream of feature requests from the commercial team, which was the best possible signal: they were using it. The catalog had become a live sales tool. Reps were pulling it up on their phones during client meetings to walk through product options in real time. That use case, which we had anticipated but not fully designed for, drove the entire post-launch roadmap.
The requests were consistent and practical. Everything pointed toward optimizing the experience for small screens in active use: scrollable navigation bars, dropdown category lists, toggling between grid and list views, and smarter filtering so a rep could narrow from 500 products to the relevant five in seconds. These were not cosmetic requests. They were workflow requests from people who had replaced a physical binder with an app and needed it to behave accordingly.
Three things stand out from this project. First, a catalog is rarely just a catalog. For E'kabel, it was a sales tool, a lead generation surface, a brand asset, and the infrastructure layer for a future e-commerce operation. Getting the architecture right from the start meant the platform could grow into each of those roles without being rebuilt. Second, content migration is always underestimated. The technical build was straightforward; the operational work of extracting, standardizing, and validating 500 products from an unstructured source was not. In projects that involve digitizing legacy content, that effort deserves its own track in the project plan. Third, the commercial team is your best QA environment post-launch. Their unsolicited feature requests after go-live were more revealing about real usage patterns than any pre-launch testing session. Designing for how salespeople actually work in the field, not how they work at a desk, is a different problem and one worth solving explicitly.
