Asian Paints - Ezycolour Kiosks

USER

Asian Paints' In-Store Customers

DURATION

2 months

Role

I worked on this project during my tenure as UX Lead at Thence. I took charge for this project since it required extensive research and a thorough end-to-end UX flow. I performed field research, collated the findings, and condensed them into the core for my solutioning.

Design Objective

To understand and analyse the current working and shortcomings of the Ezycolour Kiosk. The stakeholders' main focus was on the lack of usability and need for visual refresh, since the user's journey was solid.

Apart from this, the client asked that we re-design the Ezycolour Kiosk interface to create a more seamless, and intuitive product for customers and dealers alike. Our additional objective was to provide novelty to the product as a future scope to delight and motivate customers and increase engagement in store.

WHAt IS AN EZYCOLOUR KIOSK?

Asian Paints outfitted selected authorised dealers with the Ezycolour Kiosk. This kiosk consisted of a touch screen monitor with a pre-loaded software that was meant to aid dealers with colour consultation, project visualisation & showcase product to customers in store.

Colour Consultation - A range of shades, styles and finishes are presented to the customer within to suit their requirements.
Project Visualisation - An exercise to visualise how a sample/custom environment will look with Asian Paints’ colours.
Product Showcase

FIELD & USER STUDY

The kiosks, on average, serve about 15 - 30 customers a day. This number varies depending on the dealer's workload. We performed a contextual inquiry while we observed how customers and dealers interacted with the kiosk.

This study not only helped us observe pain points, but determine physical constraints that users had in store. This particularly affected the frequency, duration of engagement that both dealers & customers had with it. The team also visited several locations to speak extensively, and interview a variety of dealers and customers.

The field study took us to various locations of the Ezycolour Kiosks located in Bengaluru, Karnataka

PERSONAS

There were two personas vital to this experience. One was the Asian Paints' customer who would physically interact with the kiosk on their visit. The other was the dealer who guided the customer and took over operation of the kiosk in the event that the customer didn't. This was especially unique since ultimately this experience would have to cater to both personas despite having different user goals.

To compile these personas, we relied on existing data on the average customer & dealer. In order to further validate this information, we used the interviews from the field study stage to support the creation of these two distinct personas.

PAIN POINTS

We curated a card sort, guided by the data we collected in the user study stage. Since users had similar experiences, it helped us streamline into the cohesive pain points.

These pain points are broadly outlined below;

Digital swatches do not reflect the actual shade cards. This tends to make visualisation fragmented from actual result.
Effective visualisation & demos are completely dependant on the dealer's adept use of the system, or lack thereof.
Facing difficulty uploading custom images to the system.
Ergonomically challenging data entry with an unoptimised digital keyboard.
Customers have no output or reference material apart from verbal affirmation.
Frequent crashes, hanging of the software & lack of autostart

INSIGHTS

There were some core insights derived from the study that shaped the direction of the new solution. These insights are detailed below;

Difficult Navigation - The system is fragmented into several disorganised buckets.
Colour Matching - The colour on the screen don’t match the actual colour from the shade card that contains the true shade.
Tedious Layer Selection - The selection tool (like the function of the 'Magic Wand' on Photoshop) for surfaces to re-colour is extremely tedious and inaccurate.
Incorrect System Mount - The actual monitor is mounted at a very inaccessible angle. This makes the touch interface very complicated to use. In addition, the experience doesn't account for the ergonomic challenges.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

The research indicated that both customers and dealers frequently used only the visualisation function of the system and the rest of the system only became relevant once the need would arise.

For example, while users definitely enjoyed the versatility of the gallery and the product showcase, the usage and interaction with those components were infrequent compared to the Visualiser. Similarly, with the proposed contractor search, while extremely helpful, users wouldn't interact until either a decision had been made, or a sale had occured.

Ezycolour's proposed information architecture

WIREFRAMES

The initial wireframes were designed to capture key insights and address the pain points that were identified earlier. These were refined further to create a seamless user journey while they interacted with the kiosks.

Surface selection - Defining all surfaces, and neatening them up so the process of switching colours in the next step gets easier.

Main Workspace - A clearly defined workspace that was designed to reflect Asian Paints' online visualisation tool experience.

Product Detail - Once the customer has selected a colour, they're directed to a detailed breakdown and suggestions to pair the selected colour with.

An archive of saved renders - This helps not only customers but dealers to refer back to past renders but also helps them create custom curations.

FINAL DESIGN

As part of the final output, the wireframes were refined were refined into the design below. Some of the signature features included the Visualiser, Colour recommendation carousel, and Contractor Search.

The visualiser was designed to reflect a similar experience to Asian Paints online browser based visualiser experience. The colour recommendation carousel and contractor search were included to create a more end to end user journey for the customer, accounting for inspiration and implementation (contractors to apply the paint).

Landing page

Edit Mode - Visualiser

Recommendation Carousel

Product Detail

Contractor Search

Gallery & Archive