James Hardie siding products, a long time Merge client, came to us with new strategy for their product color offerings.

For years, James Hardie offered different colors for their products based on the customer’s zip code. In the new strategy, a Statement Collection would be culled down to a core set of colors offered in most zip codes, but would still be zip code dependent. Committing to a set of products/colors helped streamline their distribution process. In addition to the Statement Collection, they would now offer 700+ colors in the Dream Collection. Dream Collection products are more of a custom order and while they take longer to fulfill, they give architects and builders a lot more creative freedom.

The project presented a real challenge. Although James Hardie was happy to offer the Dream Collection to their most selective customers, from a distribution standpoint, the Statement Collection is what they wanted to promote and encourage. Creating a seamless user experience that adhered to this hierarchy was the main objective in the designs. Furthermore, from a data/site architecture standpoint, we needed to be conscious of the load time of the page and come up with an experience that didn’t require all data to load for all products on the page at one time.

The solution was a responsive product drawer system, that prioritizes the Statement Collection while also making it easy to seek out more colors if a user desires. These changes affected many different areas within the site and was a true collaboration between UX leads, designers, front and backend developers, producers and the client.