Coating is the main step in the manufacturing process of many common and new products such as paper, adhesive and magnetic tapes, and flexible and transparent electronics. Most of the available analyses consider the coating liquid as Newtonian. However, in many applications the coating liquid is a complex fluid composed by particles suspended in a viscous medium. The effect of suspended particles in the coating liquid on the coating flow remains unknown. Local variation of particle concentration associated with different mechanisms of particle migration may lead to viscosity gradients, which can change the flow pattern and final particle structure in the coated film. Moreover, if the particles are small enough, colloidal forces are important and hence non-Newtonian behavior such as shear-thinning and shear-thickening may occur. In this study, the conservation equations of mass, momentum and particle transport, are considered in which the viscosity is assumed to vary not only with local particle concentration but also with local shear rate (i.e. shear sensitive liquids). With this in mind, we employ the Diffusive Flux Model (DFM) to capture particle diffusion where irreversible particle-particle interactions are dominant. The conservation equations together with the set of differential equations that describes the mapping between the unknown flow domain to a fixed reference domain are solved using the Galerkin/Finite Element Method (GFEM). The resulting non-linear system of algebraic equations is solved using Newton s method coupled with a robust LU frontal solver. The results show how the rheological behavior of colloidal suspensions affects the particle distribution on the deposited liquid film and the process limits in a typical slot coating flow.