PROs are professional painting customers registered with Sherwin-Williams. They contributed 80% of the revenue and are gradually adopting e-comm platforms. My team were challenged to redesign the PRO+ APP that meets PRO's special needs and helps differentiate the business. We delivered a brand new experience with the a modern design system, clear Information Architecture, and Industry-leading e-commerce and project management functionality within just one and a half months. The product is live now and loved by our users!
Yuanyuan Hu - Lead Product Designer
Stephan Ginhoven - Product Designer
Angela Swauger - Product Manager
Meghan Lewis - UX Researcher
Angeleena Zacho - Copy Writer
Katherine Boller - Design Intern
As many homeowners or property managers will hire a contractor to do their project, pro is also the people who choose products and buy products for the project they are doing. 90% of our sales used to come from that professional customer. Sherwin-Williams provides special offers and many other tools to help them with their job. Those customers are relatively slow in adopting technologies, they call their stores and do many things face to face. Meanwhile, there are also increasingly more young people stepping into this new industry, they have a totally different mindset in running their business.
I did a quick heuristic evaluation of this app, it is usable but definitely not user-friendly. According to my evaluation, what I heard from users and stakeholders, I identified three main aspects that we need to work on in this new version.
- Didn't feel like a an E-comm app
- Didn't reflect Sherwin’s brand
- Lack of functions in the APP
- Lack of connections with store
- Inefficient workflows
- Information didn't well structured
We may think the painting Pro's main job is painting the walls, but that's not necessarily true. Apart from painting, they spend much of their time getting new clients bidding for projects and doing overall management. Not only Sherwin, but many of our competitors also wanted to provide premiums service that helps them with all the other jobs. That's an important differentiator for the business and leads to many projects we have been working on.
Rapid IA: We have a lot to achieve in this project. We wanted to be focused and deliver sooner but also do not want to lose any great thoughts. Firstly I lead a brainstorming session with stakeholders to list all the features we want to have, regardless of the effort it will take. Then, I guided people to prioritize, what to achieve now, near, and future - so we have a clear road map that helps us all be on the same page. Taking all the ideas and features from the brainstorming and some regular features that we need for a typical Ecomm app, I quickly made this high-level Information architecture. That helped us all have a clear view of what we are designing and be able to divide and conquer.
E2E Flow: Since the key role of this app is to help users shop Sherwin's products. I thought about the end-to-end flow since the beginning. I love to build prototypes even with lo-fi wires and let people try them rather than just look at them. Even it is just a very early stage wireframe, it convinces people with some valuable features: Account QR code, Guest Cart, Account Dash, and the general APP structures.
The most important insights we had about Pros are 1. They are repurchasing the same products. 2. They heavily rely on physical stores. That is why we prioritize the three tile buttons and store information. Many PROs don't know Sherwin also provided many other products other than paints, so I put all the categories at the end for PROs to explore.
When I designed this shop flow. The key success factor is to make it extremely easy and to reduce clicks:
1. Coupon: rather than having PROs manually input coupon codes, I recommended showing available offers while users are checking out. Pros really like this little feature.
2. Agree and pay: We used to have a separate step for users to check "Agree on Terms". While researching other applications, I found it common to combine this two-step, this is then well accepted by the legal team.
I created fully clickable prototypes to help engineers to navigate the whole app, and understand interaction detail.
I teach engineers to inspect components in Figma. For details that aren't apparent, I write annotations and provide user flows to further explain.
I checked the latest build and collected UX issues to discuss with Engineers, hosted weekly sync meetings, and manage Q&A tickets in Jira.
