Project Diary: A Guided DIY Paint Experience
Product Strategy
UX Design
Service Design
Duration
6 Months
Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
CTO, CX Lead, 4 Devs
Visit Live Site
Overview
Project Diary is a guided project experience inside the MissPompadour apps that helps DIY customers plan, document, and complete their painting projects with confidence. It connects moodboards, colour selection, quantity estimation, shopping, tutorials, and community support into one continuous flow from idea to finished room.
Outcome
The Project Diary feature turns an unstructured paint idea into a step‑by‑step journey that users can follow at their own pace. Customers create a project, upload before/after photos, choose colours, calculate quantities, order the right products, watch relevant tutorials, and share the final result with the MissPompadour community.
Design Goals Achieved
Create a guided project flow that breaks painting into understandable steps: plan, shop, and paint.
Help users make confident decisions on colour, material, and quantity without expert supervision.
Connect inspiration (moodboards and community photos) with concrete actions like product selection and ordering.
Surface the most relevant tutorials, blogs, and Q&A content at the moment users need them.
Encourage users to document before/after photos and share projects back to the community for inspiration.
These goals ensured the feature serves both first‑time DIYers and experienced painters who want structure and reassurance.
Process
We followed a user-centered design approach with multiple iterations and testing phases to ensure the final solution met both business goals and user needs.
Challenge
Decision Complexity
Users struggled to connect inspiration images from social media with exact colours and products available in the shop.
Estimating paint quantity for different room sizes and surfaces often required contacting customer support.
Many customers paused or abandoned projects because they weren’t sure if they had the right preparation products and tools.
Fragmented Experience
Inspiration, tutorials, Q&A, and products existed in separate sections, forcing users to jump between pages.
There was no single place where a user’s photos, chosen colours, and order details lived together as “one project”.
Progress tracking across multiple painting sessions (plan, shop, paint, share) was not visible or encouraging.
Community and Confidence
The DIY community created great content, but users couldn’t easily filter it by project type or colour to validate their own decisions.
After finishing, users had no simple way to document and celebrate their results, reducing the chance of word‑of‑mouth sharing.
These combined challenges led to uncertainty, extra support load, and lost opportunities for ongoing engagement around each project.
