AR home custom. application
Enabling users to explore various color palettes and combinations directly within their living space.
Challenge
Design and validate a new application focused on color inspiration and selection, exploring potential market segments to address for Akzo Nobel, a Fortune 500 company specializing in paints, coatings, and speciality chemicals.
Outcome
A market-ready application for launch in 5 countries across 3 continents in the form of an augmented reality home painting customization application, including the UX and UI design.
Timeline
6 months, 16 hours/week
My role
As the Lead UX Designer, I spearheaded all design aspects of the project, from concept to execution. My responsibilities included UX/UI design, experiment facilitation, online experimentation, prototype design, and design reviews, ensuring seamless collaboration within a multidisciplinary team.
UI design of the onboarding and home screens created as a handover to the development team.
UI design of the product, visualisation and combination screens created as a handover to the development team
Process
Online experimentation
Facilitated (online) workshop with the team to design experiments, enabling them to bring their ideas and concerts to the table, while fostering collaboration and creativity.
Led online experimentation (e.g. fake door, Wizard of Oz), which included designing multiple rounds of advertisements and landing pages (incl. Hotjar, Social Media Ads) to validate different value propositions.
Designed multiple interactive prototypes using AdobeXD and Sketch for online experimentation.
For the online experiments multiple prototypes and Facebook ads redirecting to landing pages were designed, each version containing different content to test different value propositions across different market segments (i.e. Brazil, Vietnam, UK, Netherlands, Spain).
From prototype to UI design
Use tested flows and prioritized content and features on relevance for the users, resulting in an application advising a color palette, based on someone's preferences (via swiping), which could be tried out in the user's room using AR functionality.
Different stages of the digital prototype for online experimentation to test user flows using heatmaps and user drop-off rate.
Final design
Market-ready application
Successfully developed a market-ready augmented reality home painting customization application. This included comprehensive UX/UI design, paving the way for launch across five countries on three continents. Despite not launching due to a shift in business focus, the project yielded invaluable insights and innovations.
Reflection
The never-ending love story between qual and quant user research
1.
Relying solely on quantitative data can present challenges. Quantitative metrics such as heatmaps and drop-off rates can provide valuable insights into user interactions, but they may not always reveal the "why" behind those behaviors.
2.
The importance of recurring design reviews after handing over UI Design to the front-end developer, namely a direct translation of the design was not always straightforward.
3.
A validated value proposition and design do not guarantee a successful implementation. Due to a shift in business focus, the application was not launched.