INTRO
The builder is the shop
Customneon sells made-to-order LED neon signs online. Nearly every order is configured in one screen: type your text, choose a font, a colour and a size, and the builder renders a preview and a price. It exposed exactly one colour per sign while the factory had been making two- and three-colour signs by hand for years.
The problem
Customers couldn't tell multi-colour was possible, so they compromised or bought elsewhere.
The option wasn't in the product
Multi-colour existed as something the design team could do, not as something the builder offered. There was no control to find.
Audit of the live builder and the ordering journey end to end — no entry point for a second colour at any step.
The design team absorbed it by hand
Every multi-colour sign started as an email. Someone read the request, mocked it up, sent a proof back, and waited for a reply before the order could exist.
Three months of design-team request threads, read and tallied by request type — per-word colour was the most common ask.
The ones who didn't email just left
A customer who assumed one colour was the limit had two options: order something plainer than they wanted, or buy from a builder that showed the choice.
Competitor audit — several UK builders surfaced per-word colour directly in the configurator, plus sales-call notes on lost quotes.
IMPACT
Did customers notice the new option?
A restrained click heatmap keeps the focus on the Multicoloured Text control. The rest of the builder stays cool, making the interaction pattern easier to explain.
The strongest click cluster sat on the new self-serve feature.
ILLUSTRATIVE CLICK RATE
1 in 8
customers clicked
Multicoloured Text
12.5%
For every eight sign customers, one clicked the feature.
The option was visible without overpowering the builder.
The simulated hotspot supports the self-serve direction. The production measure to track next is multi-colour attach rate, alongside manual design tickets per week.
Design Goal
Give people a choice they never knew they had
Keep the preview honest about the parcel.
Open
Let anyone colour a sign word by word, themselves, without leaving the builder.
Open
Make the choice obvious, not merely available
Open
The Solution
Making multi-colour designs self-serve
Applying different colours to individual words was one of the most common manual customer requests. I designed a per-word colour picker that updated the customer’s preview and design proof. Customers could create the effect themselves without leaving the ordering journey or waiting for the design team.
Tapping a word swaps its colour. The preview and the design proof update together.
A.
The word is the control
Open
B.
Swatches open in place
Open
C.
Price and proof follow
Open
The process
Please click through
Turning the solution into a reusable pattern
I turned the colour picker into a reusable component rather than treating it as a one-off screen.
From blank builder to paid order
Applying different colours to individual words was one of the most common manual customer requests. I designed a per-word colour picker that updated the customer’s preview and design proof. Customers could create the effect themselves without leaving the ordering journey or waiting for the design team.
