Colart projects detail
COLART: It all started when…
-
Development: ‘In House’ - consisting of three Junior Developers, Senior Developer & Solutions Architect, and ‘offshore’ agencies
User Research: Customer interviews, website data analysis (Power BI), extensive social listening & customer lifecycle reporting
Brand websites owned: Winsor & Newton, Liquitex, Snazaroo Elephant Kiosk, Lefranc et Bourgeois
Team leadership/ Line Management: SEO Manager, UX/UI Designer, Website Channel Specialist
CMS: WordPress
Product methodologies: Kanban within an Agile Framework
The Role
Over three years, I spearheaded product roadmaps and strategy for the evolution of Colart's five main brand websites—Liquitex, Winsor & Newton, Snazaroo, Lefranc et Bourgeois, and Elephant. This involved managing change and business-as-usual backlogs for front-end optimization, CMS advancements, IA restructuring, and user experience design. I played a strategic role in proposing new features, API integrations, and accessibility improvements, collaborating closely with brand, commercial, and technology stakeholders to deliver innovative consumer experiences aligning with broader digital objectives. The role also encompassed redesigning internal development processes, work methods, and democratizing digital training and tools in response to growing demand.
The Challenge
From a comprehensive standpoint, the task involved effectively navigating the desktop and mobile experiences of the brand website amid a dynamically changing organizational and digital environment inherent in complex 'Digital Transformation' projects. Numerous factors, including the global pandemic, heightened production costs for raw materials, uncertainties in post-Brexit EU legislation for product imports and exports, and evolving consumer preferences and trust, particularly for paint-based products such as face paints, influenced Colart as a business by the end of 2022. While this provides a macro perspective, the primary focus remained on the pressing need for heightened productivity and innovation within the digital and technology teams.
Case studies: Projects and ‘Democratization’ initiatives
1) Integrating Digital Product culture
As part of a business wide ‘Digital Democratization’ project at Colart, and the remit for the last year of the role, the digital web real estate and stack for ‘local’ international marketing teams specifically, was due a significant upgrade. This centered on building a new network of local language sites into the existing network, and more over providing at least the same range of digital tools to the teams.
These teams in general were very capable, and digitally savvy – but perhaps lacked the toolboxes of the wider ‘global’ business. This was normally being denoted by the size of the international territory in each case. Nonetheless, it was a chance to improve the culture, specifically around releasing new tools and capabilities to the wider digital and marketing teams.
The foundation of the project was cloning and redesigning trimmed down versions of the main .com website with a bank of widgets and plugins adapted for international languages. This rollout would ideally lead to future proofing the web marketing capability for the local market teams.
The big wins, however ended up being an opportunity to further reassign and filter BAU change requests to developers, thus freeing up actual ‘build’ resource for local teams. This was a direct result of the local teams having more tools at their disposal. The other win was in the realm of knowledge share. As such myself and one of my team had the chance to create new dynamic training videos and in-depth guides within what we called the Colart Digital Academy. This was initiated by our CTO, with reigns and responsibility for the building the so-called academy handed over product teams to evolve the resource. All in all, at the centre of the initiative lies education and creating then space within product lifecycles to prioritizing building universal digital capabilities.
2) Embedding Accessibility
As the websites, digital and team capabilities evolved, we were able to begin to review and work towards improving, down to the smallest styling element – the overall accessibility and assisted technologies of our websites.
From a wider business perspective, it was important to acknowledge that this would not be a ‘quick fix’, but rather a long term iterative process. This remained central to managing the expectations of the brand’s audience.
In that sense, the first steps were acknowledging within our customer experience mandate, visible to any visitor of the websites, our mission to gradually embed accessible functionality and design.
The first wave of improvements and optimizations, kicked started a three-year projected product road map focused solely on accessibility. These included reviewing many aspects of the styling, introducing more legible fonts and typesets, audio and dictation options for customer feedback, higher contrast elements within landing page design, and redesigned call to action and purchase buttons. Although very product driven, these improvements initiated a wider cultural shift in tone of voice and the refreshing of all style guides associated with the web and mobile platforms.
Improving Delivery & Sustainable Development Processes
Selected Projects & Optimisations delivered
Below are some of the projects & optimisations succussfully. All of which sit within improving website Information Architecture, User Interface, User Experience Design and User Journeys.
Through out my tenure—the adaptive nature of the role meant leading on product delivery, strategy, research and analysis, design sprint planning whilst also taking on design and prototyping tasks where required.
New Navigation System
Mediums Finder function
Custom eGift Card
Custom Bundle solution for products
End-to-end ‘Path to Purchase’ revamp – All brand sites
Website relaunch and CMS migration – Winsor & Newton
D2C acceleration Snazaroo (Multiplatform)
International ‘Local market’ Microsites development
CMS Network restructure
Product development resource
IA review and restructure – Winsor & Newton
UX Check out review and upgrade.
UX ‘My account’ review and upgrade