Ikea Place — App review
In 2017, Swedish furniture company Ikea launched a new app called Ikea Place. Ikea Place is a practical app that uses augmented reality to help users determine whether Ikea’s furniture would fit into their home or not. The app was received with great enthusiasm, and quickly became the most downloaded free app in the app store that uses AR for non-gaming purposes.
Loading
It takes a while before you get any feedback from the app when it starts up. After a few moments the Ikea logo and a simplistic animation appears, showing the loading progress. The minimalistic and clear design is something that can be found throughout the whole app, but the loading screen could have been a bit more exiting, as the concept of Ikea place appeals to the imagination of many new users.
Onboarding
When you boot up the app for the first time, a short onboarding process takes place in the shape of a chatbot. You get more information about the possibilities of the app, why the app needs permission to use the camera and the privacy agreement that you need to accept to go further.
The introduction is certainly useful to give new user a good start when they first open the app. It taught me that the app can not only be used to test furniture in a certain space, but also to find similar products from their catalogue by making a photo of furniture. I also find it soothing that it is first explained why the app needs permission to use the camera before the actual permission notification pops up.
Start
The next screen displays the core features of the app again in a clean overview. When you tap the screen, your camera automatically opens and the chat message “let’s start adding furniture” pops up in the top left corner.
After this message I was a little bit confused because I expected some more instructions to pop up. I think that this part could have easily been part of the onboarding process. A clear ‘help’ button that would provide some guidelines could have also been helpful.
The catalog
When you tap the plus at the bottom of the screen, the catalog pops up with some highlighted items and categories to get you started. You can find more info about each item once you tap on it. There will also appear a call to action at the bottom of the screen to add the furniture to your room by using AR.
The catalogue provides a simple and clean overview. The “getting started” items are a good addition because they act as test objects, as many users want to try the AR feature first before actually searching for any furniture.
Searching the catalog
A search bar appears when tapping on the search icon in the right top corner. After entering a keyword, a subtle filter button pops up at the bottom of the screen. It seems to me that this button is something that could be easily overlooked, and placing it closer to the search bar would certainly do it justice.
The filter contains only one option, which is filtering between a certain price range. Adding some more options like they do on their website would seem more logical. On the main page of the catalog there is also a menu with an overview of all the categories. These categories could also be useful as filter options when searching the catalog.
Scanning the room
Once you have chosen an item you want to place in your room, a popup appears stating that you need to scan the room first. To do so, you need to point the camera towards the floor. Here I encountered some problems because I wasn’t sure what to do exactly. I didn’t know whether the animation was a loading animation or an instruction for me to move the camera around.
Sometimes it would take minutes before anything happened while I was slowly moving the camera around, and sometimes the room was scanned in just a few seconds without me doing anything. The yellow dots on the floor do seem to give some feedback to the user that scanning the room is in progress.
The tips that were offered by popup in the top corner were about good lightning and moving rubbish out of sight, but not of any help for me when actually scanning.
Placing an item
When the floor is scanned, the chosen item appears on the screen in your room. You can easily place the item anywhere further or closer by dragging it around. The way the scale of the item changes when you move it is really well done. The shadow that comes with the object is a nice realistic touch.
Rotating the item is possible when you use two fingers, this makes it sometimes a little bit clumsy to do so, but otherwise it works well. When rotating the object, a white line in the circle around the item points out the front of the object, which could be useful for certain types of furniture.
This way you can place multiple items in the same room. The items do glitch a little bit when you place them too close to each other, but otherwise combining them goes really well.
Saving a place
When you like the way you decorated the room with your new digital furniture, you can save your setup by tapping on the menu in right top corner and choose “save place”. I imaged that when you save a space, you would be able to take a few pictures of your new virtual interior. But instead, you are only asked to take a header image. I was a little bit confused by this because the photo frame is kind of small and there was not really any more of an explanation besides “make header image”. Once saved, a popup appears saying that your setup is saved.
Viewing saved places
To view your saved places, you need to go back to menu in the top right corner and tap “view saved places”. When you tap on a saved setup, you get a clean overview of all the items that were used to decorate that space. This way you can easily take a look at all the details of each item.
If you tap on the header image the app jumps back to your camera and you are asked to scan your room again. When the scanning is complete, all the saved items appear back on your screen and you can drag them around again.
As I said before, I think it would be a good feature to add the possibility to simply take a few pictures of your new digital interior, so you can view them later in your saved places.
Finding a similar object
To find a similar object you tap on the icon on the bottom left. A pop up appears and gives you the instruction to point your camera towards the object you want to find something similar to and to tap on it. Some kind of crop tool appears on the screen and you can adjust the canvas to fit the object. After this you are presented with a list of similar furniture that can be found in the Ikea catalog.
I was really amazed by how simple and user friendly this feature is. After scanning al sorts of items and furniture, the app was always able to present me items in the catalog that were really similar, even when I could only take a picture of a part of the object.
Profile
When you hit the like button next to an object, it appears on the list of your likes on your profile. And that is everything that there is to say about the profile. There could be done more with this profile, as for example it would also be a good place to display your saved places.
Conclusion
The Ikea Place app generally provides users with a pleasant experience. The design and interactions are simple and minimalistic, so that the emphasis is on what the app does best: implementing the AR. It’s the small details like the shadow, the realistic scaling and the little bounce when you drop the item that really make a big difference in the experience. There is always room for improvement of course, but the Ikea Place app gives us a glimpse of the exciting and practical possibilities that augmented reality could offer in the future.