Project Overview

We were responsible for renewing the Japan Institute for Promotion of Digital Economy and Community (JIPDEC) Business Search Service, which is operated by JIPDEC, the governing organization of the Privacy Mark system.

Key themes of this project were maintaining the existing high-speed search experience, supporting smartphones, and significantly improving the content update workflow.

Background and Challenges

The legacy system offered fast search performance, but updating business information required a great deal of manual work. The process of exporting data from the business system, processing it locally, and then uploading it was time-consuming and labor-intensive, creating operational costs and risks.

As the system had become outdated, there was a need to reduce maintenance burden and establish a more efficient operational structure. In addition, supporting a range of devices, including smartphones, had become a challenge.

Why We Selected Kuroco

After comparing and evaluating several architectures and confirming feasibility, we found that Kuroco offered the following advantages.

1. High-speed search performance

   Searches across large volumes of data return results extremely quickly, maintaining a experience on par with or better than your existing site.

2. Automatic updates via API integration

   Data from your business systems can be connected via API, fully automating content update workflows.

3. Simpler and faster frontend deployment

   With KurocoFront, a CDN-based static content hosting service, there is no need to separately contract for and manage hosting or CDN services, significantly reducing the burden of infrastructure management.

4. Flexible extensibility with Smarty

   In addition to headless CMS capabilities, Kuroco lets you customize API behavior using Smarty, so you can flexibly build integrations with external systems and various domains. Processing search results and implementing custom display logic is straightforward, which is also a benefit for developers with backend expertise.

Kuroco does not offer an environment for running arbitrary programs such as AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, or Edge Functions. However, Smarty comes with a wide range of plugins that let you call APIs and save JSON, which is sufficient for most common use cases.

Development of a smartphone search UI

Even on traditional PC environments, the search functionality was already fairly easy to use. However, to deliver that same usability on smartphones, how the modal screen for switching search conditions is presented and how the user flow is organized are critical factors that shape the user experience.

By addressing these points, we optimized the experience for mobile environments while also considering web accessibility, delivering a search UI that is intuitive and comfortable to use on smartphones as well.

It was a challenging undertaking, but we believe it ultimately delivered consistent convenience across both PC and mobile.

Results and Impact

We were able to achieve an ideal build using the architecture selected at the outset.

• User Experience

  Fast search performance was maintained, allowing users to instantly locate the information they need from a large volume of provider data. A highly searchable UI was also built for smartphones.

• Operational Efficiency

  Automating the update workflow eliminated manual work and the risk of errors.

• Scalability

  Through customization using Smarty, the system can flexibly accommodate future feature expansions and external integrations.

Summary

With this renewal, we were able to achieve both operational efficiency and sustained high performance, two goals that have traditionally been difficult to reconcile.

1. Business information is automatically synchronized to Kuroco via API from the core business system
2. Batch processing regularly keeps site information up to date

Administrators are relieved of their burden, and users can continue to enjoy a smooth search experience. I believe this project demonstrates how the right technology choices can directly drive results.

Additionally, this project was supported by the deep expertise of the JIPDEC team and the solid technical skills of the vendor responsible for the core business system, allowing us to proceed smoothly and positively through to completion.

For us as well, this turned out to be a highly satisfying project.