Sherwin-Williams’s existing mobile app was out of date, unsupported, and disconnected from their current digital strategy.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 as a technical proof of concept that leveraged AI to analyze a photo of a customer’s space and, using S-W's expertise on color, recommend colors that complement the décor in that space.
Prior to Color Expert, Sherwin-Williams's digital offering was split between several disparate tools. With Color Expert, we sought to unify the journey of choosing a color into a single end-to-end experience. That journey consists of three phases – finding color, visualizing color, and sampling color – and moving seamlessly through them while still enabling freeform discovery was the core of our approach.
Connecting customers with color meant enabling non-linear exploration for customers unsure what they want, as well as creating quick, intuitive pathways for confident customers to find and try a color they had in mind.
Many customers have a vision in their head, but need a guiding hand to help bring it to life. Surfacing both color trends and Sherwin's institutional color expertise was key in demystifying and organizing the vast selection of Sherwin's color catalog.
For customers who have no idea what they want, the Color Recommendation Tool provides recommendations that are intentionally biased against neutrals and other safe shades. Coupled with automatic visualization, the tool invites customers to consider a range of diverse hues and shades they otherwise might not have thought of.
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 concept: when you hold color in your hand, it should feel as immersive and tactile as possible.
Color Expert presented a new opportunity for the brand: how does your relationship with color change when you interact with it directly with your fingers? Color is an abstract, intangible concept, and every on-screen representation of it is just an approximation. How can we bring the feeling of experiencing color in real life into the digital 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. A library of directional shadows and subtle gradients enabled a system of global light, connecting color to the surrounding world.
By tinting the user's dashboard with their most recently saved color, we unlock a unique feeling of personalization. Using a set of formulae that adjusts the paint color's RGB values, the app programmatically applies a scale of tints and shades to the entire UI, while preserving the hue and undertones of the original color. The whole system is based on color contrast standards to ensure every element remains accessible.
After 6 months
695k
Total Downloads
157k
monthly active users
101k
Color samples shipped
#63
app store ranking, lifestyle
4.6
app store rating
#1.8m
Colors saved in-app
Additional credits
Katie Sloma / UX Direction and Copywriting
Forrest Buchly / Copywriting
Gregory Kaufman / Motion Design
Austin Li / Initial concepting, technical PoC
Stephan van Ginhoven / Initial concepting, technical PoC
