Akzonobel

An international website with the right balance between uniformity, flexibility and ease of use

Een geschilderde wand met het woord 'nat' gemaakt van afplak-tape

AkzoNobel wanted a redesign for its international website for consumer paint. The pillars of our solution are uniformity, flexibility and convenience, assuring the brand value of AkzoNobel is guaranteed, and allowing countries to easily customize the website.

How can you mix uniformity and flexibility?

Being a multinational, AkzoNobel serves dozens of local markets worldwide. This has implications for digital communication. Their consumer paint site for example is published in 46 countries. The redesign of this site had to radiate not only a strong brand value but also offer more flexibility to local markets without ignoring the variety of user groups. Our UX employees developed just the right solution for this challenge.

The users' perspective

The information needs of DIY consumers differ from the needs of consumers who outsource painting projects. The AkzoNobel website must serve both groups equally well. The basis of our work is research. This includes reviewing existing studies from the marketing department, web statistics, as well as creating customer journeys to identify the pains of user groups. Following the research we developed the appropriate solutions such as a paint calculator to help DIY consumers to calculate the amoubt of paint they need.

It was a real challenge for me to find the right balance between uniformity, flexibility and convenience in all my design solutions for AkzoNobel.

Denny Hurkmans

— 

UX designer

ING Netherlands

A box full of useful building blocks

In a scrum team we delivered new functionality in sprints of two weeks. As a result, an ever-growing collection of useful building blocks has been created. Thanks to these blocks, countries can build content pages themselves, and choose whether or not to use elements such as a product or image module. With the color module, they can quickly determine and adjust the use of color. And the text module helps countries easily manage their own copy.

UX in front of and behind the screens

In addition to the redesign of the consumer website we also delivered a new site for professional painters in various local markets. Furthermore, we contributed to the improvement of the design process and the creation of a component library. Our UX lead coordinated all these projects. For example, we helped AkzoNobel to streamline its digital products and services, both in front of as well as behind the scenes.

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