Colour
with AP
Redesigning Asian Paints’ consumer colour-discovery app — untangling a cluttered, unintuitive colour exploration experience used by millions of homeowners.
The Business
Problem
Colour with Asian Paints is a widely used consumer app for exploring and selecting paint colours for the home. Despite strong reach, the experience had accumulated years of feature bloat, inconsistent visual hierarchy, and an onboarding flow that didn’t reflect how Indian users actually engage with a home-improvement app.
The brief was simply “redesign the app.” Without a shared framework for what “better” meant, that brief risked turning into a purely visual refresh — polishing screens without fixing the underlying usability problems.
Two Heuristic
Lenses
To turn a subjective “this feels off” into a concrete, fixable list, I audited every screen through two models: NPCI (Navigation, Presentation, Content, Interaction) and VIMM (Visual, Intellectual, Memory, Motor load).
Navigation
How easily can users find their way around the app? Impacts flow, main navigation, and task completion.
Presentation
Can users understand what they’re looking at? Impacts visual design, icons, colours, and layout.
Content
Is the content appropriate, and does it match what the user came for? Impacts consumption and engagement.
Interaction
Can users act on the controls to access content? Impacts task completion and device efficiency.
Visual Load
Applied when there are too many visual elements, or visually unclear elements competing for attention.
Intellectual Load
Applied when the user has to rely on deep cognition to use the interface, resulting in an unnatural experience.
Memory Load
The user has to rely on short- or long-term memory just to use the interface.
Motor Load
The user has to physically articulate unnecessarily — moving long distances, or switching devices.
What The Audit
Surfaced
Learning From
Color Snap
Before redesigning, I benchmarked against Color Snap by Sherwin-Williams — a mature competitor with several patterns worth borrowing.
Restructuring
the Experience
The redesign reorganized the home screen around clear service entry points, simplified colour discovery into family-based swatches, and introduced an AR-style “visualize on your wall” flow — bringing the app closer to how competitors like Color Snap let users try before committing.
Screenshot pending — will slot in once uploaded to Media Library.
What I
Learned
The biggest shift wasn’t visual — it was decomposing a vague “redesign the app” brief into two heuristic frameworks that made prioritization concrete. NPCI and VIMM gave stakeholders shared language to agree on what “better” actually meant, before a single new screen was drawn.
Benchmarking against Color Snap also reinforced that for a colour-discovery app, trust-building features (accurate colour match warnings, budget calculators, store locators) matter as much as the core browsing experience.