Taubmans

Client Background

Taubmans is a major Australian paint and coatings brand founded in 1897, and is owned by PPG Industries, a global coatings company. It offers a wide range of interior and exterior paints, prep products, and specialized finishes designed for Australian conditions and it is a household name known for its deep legacy and heritage.

Challenge and Objective

Taubmans Paints' Australian website was controlled out of the US, where even a minor content change took three months, leaving local distributors frustrated and consumers underserved. At the same time, trade painters could only place orders by phone or in-store. That put the brand nearly a decade behind competitors already offering digital solutions. US-based website was slow, with minor text changes taking months, and both trade and B2C customers needed an experience which was on-par with the market and at the same time forward trending. It was time for an overhaul.

Problem Statement

Taubmans needed to move at the speed of local trade to keep up with thee local market needs, while maintaining the pricing and franchise relationships the business depended on.

Experience Audit

Kicking off in the discovery phase, we undertook 2 on-site activities with the stakeholders. We held an experience workshop with internal stakeholders, to better understand the current state of the website experience, mapping out pain points as well as understanding their user personas better. Preliminary data work had already been done by another agency prior to that so that had helped shaped some of the framing and strategic framework beforehand.

We also conducted an on-site recce at their Bristol Paints store at Clifton Hill, which happens to be one of their independent sister branches. From there, we were able to connect the digital challenge in a physical environment which how paint is actually ordered and purchased. We were able to speak to the store manager to understand in-store behaviours, workflows and their ordering process.

Competitive Benchmarking

Taubmans wasn't just behind its own potential — it was measurably behind its competitors. Moreover, based on the data provided, Dulux had already gained a huge majority of the market share. Benchmarking was used to understand the gap better, and to also understand best practices and competitor patterns. This was done with a heuristic walkthrough of competitor's sites, along with a teardown of each key pages.

Insights

Based on the initial findings from the audit, we have gathered the following key insights.

With these insights, we were then able to build upon the proto persona initially provided from the data.

Placeholder How Might We statement.

Ideation and Low Fidelity Wireframing

Using ideas and recommendations gathered from insights and data captured from the previous phase, we synthesised the concept by building a wireframe around it.

We had built a low fidelity wireframe on Figma around the user's core shopping journey and emphasise better product and colour discoverability, while also branching out to key features we wanted to test out. Some notable features we included were a product quiz, sample ordering, as well as using QR code to save colour codes.

User Testing

Using Askable, we conducted user testing with a pool of random participants. The results were positive overall, with some further insights revealed along the way.

Hi-Fidelity Design

Based on the initial round of feedback from the stakeholders and user testing participants, we had made some slight adjustments to the wireframe before building out the high fidelity design. This was supported by the Taubman's existing brand guidelines.

Handover

A retroactive service blueprint for the stakeholders and development team was included as part of the handover. This includes the features list as well as the final user journey and information architecture. A style guide was also created for the developers and the brand content team for future reference.

Conclusion

An entirely new web experience for B2C customers, along with a trade app as part of a wider digital experience was created as part of our UX process. Taubmans now has a flexible, locally managed platform, a customer centric digital experience, and a structural foundation which can be used for future scaling.

Results

As a result of this new digital experience, Taubmans is now able to have:

• 30,000 plus spec ready, searchable colour pages
• Months to minutes content updates
• 3 disjointed experiences unified into 1 purpose-built platform