Sherwin-Williams’s existing mobile app was out of date, unsupported, and disconnected from their current digital strategy. The challenge was to design an entirely new mobile app to connect customers with color, opening a completely new channel for S-W’s digital business.
Lead Designer
Sherwin-Williams
Product design
Product strategy + vision
Mobile design system
Choosing a paint color can be a paralyzing experience. With hundreds of options, the paradox of choice can be so overwhelming that homeowners will often go with what’s popular, or even decide against painting their space completely.
As a leader in the paint space, Sherwin-Williams is uniquely positioned to solve this problem. Through a combination of institutional expertise and AI technology, Sherwin-Williams can provide homeowners the guidance they need to choose color confidently.
Color Expert began with an idea developed by S-W’s internal color innovation team: can machine learning be leveraged to analyze a photo of a customer’s space and recommend colors that complement it? Turns out – it can. The idea was developed into a proof of concept, which (after a series of internal demos) spurred the organization into prioritizing a complete redesign of their mobile app, centered around this new technology.
The opportunity of creating something completely new also proved to be the greatest challenge. Prior to Color Expert, the three key phases of the homeowner journey – find color, visualize color, and sample color – had been siloed to separate experiences on the web due to restrictions with legacy technology. Creating a single interconnected experience that covered all three phases was new territory for our team, and required extensive work to ensure the architecture of the experience was as “slippery” and intuitive as possible.
In partnership with our research team, we conducted multiple rounds of user testing to determine how best to architect the experience?????????????????????????
Sherwin-Williams had been developing a new digital look and feel on the web for several years; however, the implementation was inconsistent, and it had never been brought to a mobile context.
With Color Expert, we evolved their digital brand with a simple but powerful conceit: when you hold color in your hand, it should feel as true-to-life as possible.
The system begins with the idea at the core of the S-W brand: color is the hero. However, Color Expert presented a new opportunity: how does the paradigm change when customers can interact with color directly with their fingers? The entire goal of the experience is to connect customers with an abstract thing that only truly exists in the real world; everything digital is just an approximation. How can we elevate the digital experience to connect it with the physical color customers will hold in their hands and eventually live with on their walls?
We completely overhauled the brand’s approach to surface, elevation, and materiality. A new scale of warm whites and creams mimic natural lighting tones, to aide color perception on screens which typically lean heavily cool-toned. Coupled with the system’s existing shadow tokens, we created a system of elevation that can be applied at scale across the app.
We looked to principles outlined in Google’s original approach to Material Design, in which different parts of the UI have a physicality to them. We also looked to principles developed by Apple around immersive and spatially consistent user interfaces. An intentional approach to light, surface, and materiality creates a system that connects color to the surrounding world.
We completely overhauled the brand’s approach to surface, elevation, and materiality. A new scale of warm whites and creams mimic natural lighting tones, to aide color perception on screens which typically lean heavily cool-toned. Coupled with the system’s existing shadow tokens, we created a system of elevation that can be applied at scale across the app.
After six months
695k
total downloads
101k
color samples shipped
157k
monthly active users
1.8m
colors saved in-app
4.6
rating on the app store
#63
app store ranking, lifestyle category
