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Feel a coating through a screen.

An IBM iX (ecx.io) concept for Covestro, a chemical company whose soft touch coatings are defined by how they feel, the velvety, silky or rubbery finish on a phone case or a car interior. The brief was to translate that physical, tactile quality into a digital selection experience, so customers could explore and pre-select a formulation before a single physical sample shipped. Built as a design system and presented to the client as an iPad prototype.

Engagement
IBM iX (ecx.io) with Covestro
Focus
Concept, visual design, research
My seat
Lead Visual Designer

The problem

Covestro sells a property you can only judge with your fingertips. A coating is chosen for its haptic character, and until then the only way to evaluate one was a case of physical samples, produced and shipped to every interested customer around the world. Slow, expensive, and hard to scale.

Agencies before us had tried and missed what was actually needed. So we did what IBM iX does best and started by interviewing the client, to separate what they asked for from what the problem really was. The real job was not a catalogue. It was to let someone feel a coating through a screen well enough to narrow the field, so that only a small, relevant set of real samples ever needed to ship.

The creative leap

Touch does not have a shared visual vocabulary. To build one, I arranged for a person who is blind to come in and handle the coating samples, and describe what each one felt like and what it reminded them of. Their language was unmediated by sight, which made it the purest possible source for translating a texture into words, and then into an image.

Those descriptions became the backbone of a design system: a consistent way to turn a felt quality into a screen, so every coating in the range could be explored the same way.

The design system

One vocabulary for touch.

Every screen is built from the same parts: a colour that names the section, a display voice for feeling and a quiet voice for fact, a fixed model that maps each haptic character to a metaphor and an image, and a two-axis logic that turns a vague need into a specific coating.

Palette

Feeling

#FF803D → #EB0E77

Display gradient, the emotional layer

Performance

#664B9E

How it holds up

Formulation

#691C4C

What it is made of

Products

#6D422D

What to order

Get in touch

#109B6E

The way forward

Surface

#12100E

Near-black, so the coatings glow

Colour is not decoration here, it is navigation. Each of the four functional areas carries a fixed colour, so you always know which layer of the coating you are looking at.

Type

Velvety

Display gradient, heavy weight. Used for the one word that carries the feeling.

Lotion resistance High

Interface label and value. Quiet, exact, high contrast. Used for every specification.

soft touch explorer

Persistent wordmark, top right of every screen. The one fixed anchor.

The sensory model

The core of the system. Four haptic characters, each locked to a metaphor and an image, so a texture reads before a specification does.

Slipperya pane of glassthink of a screen
Silkyan iridescent featherthink of feathers
Velvetythe underside of a chocolate barthink of chocolate
Rubberya citrus cross-sectionthink of the bounce

Two axes

Performance
Haptic character

Pick a character and a performance level. The intersection is a real, orderable coating. A vague need becomes one specific formulation.

Card anatomy

Performance
Formulation
Products
Get in touch

The persistent footer. Four colour-coded doors, always present, each opening the same layer on any screen.

The presented prototype

Click through the real screens.

The iPad prototype shown to the client. Every screen is the design system in use. Use the arrows or your keyboard.

Soft Touch Explorer prototype screen
01 / 20Intro

Reflection

The best research source is often the least obvious one. A vocabulary for touch did not come from a focus group. It came from the person in the room least distracted by how things look.

A system is what makes delight repeatable. The feathers and the chocolate bar earn the attention. The fixed colours, the two voices and the two-axis model are what let every coating in the range earn it the same way, and what let the performance data underneath keep the trust.

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