Shaw Colorwall

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PROJECT OVERVIEW

Project + Client: Flooring Selection Tool for National Flooring Company
Team: Exec Creative Director, Design Director/Visual Designer, UX Designer
Duration: 2 weeks
Role: Lead UX Designer

We had a small team that was working a set of projects for Shaw (the flooring company) under a somewhat flexible agreement that included some ideation. One of the projects that bubbled up was to create a tool to browse a specific line of carpet that had a showroom display that salespeople and customers really liked. But it was in the store, so you had to get the customer to the store and with the entry-level products a lot of competition for attention was sprouting up online. So Shaw was looking for more interactive online tools in general.

We started with the Shaw team showing us the actual showroom display and explaining how it worked. A few sales team members talked about what they liked and also shared some customer statements. (Honestly, I’ve never purchased carpet and this was a really informative experience.)

As the UX designer on the team, I was tasked with the initial ideation, but I did have a lot to use as a starting point:
- Just before this project, I had created a customer journey map as part of getting my head around the overall online opportunity. so this was my starting point. You can see the first version I drafted on the whiteboard above.
- Our team did a quick brainstorming session together.
- My first career was as an architect, so I had a grasp of how the customer makes decisions and the other things that might be happening at the same time. Carpet replacement can be a maintenance task, an emergency, or part of a planned renovation with lots of coordination.
- AND finally, I had gotten a little obsessed with online design tools for DIY stuff and had a circle of friends that we all just talked about them all the time.

So we (me + the visual designer) started with a collage of pretty wide-ranging ideas. At the time, there was an explosion of online e-commerce brands that had this brand new aesthetic that was sort of minimal and not at the same time. And all that DIY content was just everywhere for residential decorating and design. After we narrowed it down to a few key concepts and some really cool interactions, I got started on the architecture of the experience.

This particular product line had a lot of colors, some very technical information about installation, and loads of maintenance benefits that needed to be a part of the product information. We were looking for ways to tie this experience of one carpet line back to the rest of the website for the transaction. And in the background, we had been asked to think about a future state where this tool might have all the product lines in it and be the point of entry for a customer purchase.

While I was looking at the overall structure, the visual designer got started on the details. He was the lead on all the Shaw projects, so he had been directing a team on the overall design system. There had been a major update to the Home Page. So he took the individual swatches and got to work.