Ikea for Millennials on the Move
An all-in-one planning tool for a unified user experience
Have you ever been in a situation in which you had to buy (most of) all the furnishings for your new place?
As a good (old) Millennial, I’ve had my fair share of adventures. Or better yet: of diving into the intoxicating lures of new beginnings*. In those times, Ikea has been both my best friend and worst enemy.
Why best friend, you ask? Because Ikea is convenient: you can find all you need at a single place. And it doesn’t stop there: its products are beautifully designed and reasonably priced. Not to mention the company’s efforts towards corporate social responsibility. I could go on and on.
The problems surrounding the Swedish giant lie in the process of planning, purchasing and assembling. For this Design Case, I decided to focus on the planning process — or pre-purchase phase, if you will.
Part of my choice was based on the number of incredible articles in which the processes of purchasing and assembling Ikea products have already been analyzed (like this one, this one and this one). Also, I found out that Ikea has actively been working on those problems.
But there was a personal assumption, too. Every time I need to move and choose Ikea for most of my purchases, I miss a centralized planning tool. The question was if others also experience this a problem and, of course, why Ikea should care about this.
There was only one way to find out the answer to the first question. Armed with semi-structured interviews, I fought my way to a birthday party on a chilly Saturday evening. As the attendants seemed to agree my assumption was correct, I went on to test it again — this time on a less intoxicated focus group. The result? It looked like I had a problem to solve.
But why was that an issue for Ikea? It seems it is often in the pre-purchase phase that customers wander off and start evaluating other alternatives. Those leads were good enough to start working on this Case.
Design Case: begin > middle > end
Begin: the assignment
This UX Design Case is my final assignment for Codaisseur, the Dutch Academy where I have just graduated from a Digital Design boot camp, and it is not directly connected to Ikea.
Some of the deliverables included research, information architecture, wireframes, user interfaces, prototypes, usability tests, and a Medium publication. But first, I had to come up with a problem and devise a solution, which must include 3 side features.
There was a four-day window to complete this assignment. After the final evaluation, I gave myself an extra day to work on some points — as a good (recovering) perfectionist would.
Middle: the research
The initial research focused on identifying and analyzing pain points Ikea is currently facing. That was necessary in order to form a problem statement and design a solution, as shown below.
Besides missing a unified experience, Ikea customers come across competitors while looking for and using external tools. This design’s ultimate goal is to get customers to buy as much as possible from Ikea. How? By unifying their experience and keeping them in the Ikea world through the Ikea Scan & Plan. The app would also improve customers’ experience and, as a result, their emotional connection to the brand.
End: the designs
Without any further ado, I’d like to present the final designs. For organization purposes, I divided them into two parts: one for the web app and one for the mobile app.
Design process
Selecting the ‘client’
One of the reasons I chose Ikea for this assignment was the time constraint. In order to complete a Design Case in only 4 days, I thought it’d be wise to go for a company that has been researched over and over again. Also, it doesn’t hurt to choose a brand you already know and love.
This feeling is by the way shared by many people. According to Statista, Ikea is the 25th most loved company in the world. In 2017, 2.3 billion people visited its website. That’s almost one-third of the world’s population. Quite impressive, right?
Unfortunately, Ikea customers’ experiences don’t reflect their love for the brand. More than 50% review their experience as either poor or bad. That, however, doesn’t stop them from shopping at Ikea, which keeps growing at an average of 7% a year.
Selecting a problem
So why would you work on a problem that doesn’t seem to affect a company financially? Because it is only a question of time before it does.
The current consumer’s shift and trends in the retail industry are forcing companies to rethink their business strategies, recalibrate their value propositions, and reanalyze customer behaviors.
And Ikea has been doing just that. Earlier this year, the company announced it’d reshape its business model to better suit the needs of its new customers, who are adepts of (in-store) showrooming and (online) pre-shopping.
Since Ikea has already been working on its customer’s purchase and assembling problems, I decided to focus on how the company could improve its customer’s purchase planning. Why?
IT always comes to data.
Harvard Business research shows that the most effective way to maximize customer value nowadays is to create an emotional connection with the brand, for which the customer experience is an important driver. It seems that “customers who engage in an omnichannel experience are much more emotionally connected and therefore consistently more profitable”.
The solution I propose would improve the customers’ emotional connection to Ikea by providing a more convenient, unified way for them to engage with the company through multiple avenues at the same time. Besides, it’d keep them from coming across competitors while using external tools.
But wait, who are those customers I’m talking about?
Defining the target group
Convenience, convenience, convenience
Most customers nowadays need convenience. This may not come as a surprise since that’s an intrinsic characteristic of Millennials, a generation that is expected to outnumber Baby Boomers in 2019 and will represent 75% of the workforce by 2025.
Also not surprising is the fact that companies have been fiercely competing to win over Millennials. The thousands of researches done to better understand this group are a small proof of that assertion.
Always on the move
The United States Census Bureau found that while Millennials accounted for about 24% of the total population of the U.S. between 2007 and 2012, they made up over 43% of all movers.
This generation doesn’t live the way Baby Boomers did and has a different relationship to home and furnishings. And even though places don’t seem to stick with them, brands do: they’re the most brand loyal generation*.
I want it and I want it now… but I’ve gotta plan first
Millennials are all about instant gratification. Research shows this group goes for speed, ease, convenience and efficiency in all of their transactions. When it comes to planning big purchases though, Millennials usually take their time to plan. They’re adepts of in-store showrooming and of webrooming.
Ikea is well aware of all of these trends. In fact, the company publishes an annual report about its customers’ wants and needs, entitled Life at Home.
Testing the problem assumption
As we’ve seen earlier, convenience is part of Ikea’s core values. The company provides a place where customers can find everything they want: no need to go somewhere else. When it comes to their planning tools though, it’s another story…
While Ikea offers a large number of planners, my survey showed that customers find themselves using external means when planning big purchases. Those include mood boards (7.1%), modern 3D floor planners (10.7%) and inspirational websites and apps, like Pinterest (53.6%). Only 12.5% of the survey respondents said they use the Ikea Home Planner. Some 16.1% of them answered that their Ikea purchases don’t involve any planning or that they just use the store’s catalog. Interestingly enough, 100% of these respondents turned out to be (yes, you’ve guessed right!) Baby Boomers.
Another problem surfaces when customers want to plan a whole room — or a whole house for that matter — using mostly Ikea products (who hasn’t been there?). Almost all the survey respondents (92.9%) have been in this situation before, in which 57.2% of them bought 40–100% of their furniture from Ikea.
The survey showed that planning everything separately can be rather inconvenient. Besides, some rooms still cannot be planned on the Ikea Home Planner. That is probably why 83.9% of the respondents said they’d benefit from the following solution.
Coming up with a solution
Before designing a solution, I had to switch my focus back to the target group. What do they need when planning their purchases?
In addition to the survey, it’d be important to study the Ikea customer’s journey in its pre-purchase phase. As you can see in the map below, this process is not linear and involves many channels.
Also, I thought job stories would help to design a solution to this problem.
In sum, this target group would benefit from an all-in-one planning tool, designed according to one of Ikea’s core values (convenience), which could deliver a good omnichannel experience.
Besides incorporating all Ikea planners, this tool would include three extra features: a room scanner, a product scanner, and a suggestion aid. Because of the scanners, the tool would have to be a hybrid app, which I shall name IKEA Scan & Plan.
Materializing the solution
To bring the IKEA Scan & Plan to life, I started with a simple Information Architecture. Aftwerwards, I began drawing the wireframes. At first, I wanted to go for a totally new design. But then I remembered Jacob’s Law and the consistency principle, so I ended up focusing on the user’s experience by applying the basic structure of the existing Ikea planners and apps to the Scan & Plan.
After I started to draw the wireframes, I realized I hadn’t read the suggestions given in the exploratory survey. And man, was I overwhelmed! Half of the respondents actually took the time to give suggestions for the app. These were mostly related to budget, style filters and adding external pictures.
Testing the waters
After the first mockups were ready, I ran A/B and multivariate tests through a survey, from which the following results emerged.
Interestingly, only 56 out 141 people responded the first question, from which 38 preferred the headerless screen. Also curiously, there was a draw for the second question, which was responded by 136 out 141 people. It was difficult to make something out of those answers. In the end, I decided to go with the clean option, since that was what most respondents seemed to prefer for the Room Scanner. I added a “close” button though, to make it easier for users to see they could close the scan.
Most respondents (76 out 139) liked the wording “Save item” better than just “save”. Because Ikea uses both “item” and “product” in its apps, I used Google Trends for optimization and found out that “product” scores better. For the Scan & Plan app though, the word wouldn’t fit, since the app also includes a Room Scanner and rooms aren’t necessarily a product, especially when they’re in your own house. Regarding the images on the right, 89 out of 140 respondents preferred the all-white background.
Yet another interesting result. Ikea itself uses a blue icon in its IKEA Place app, which is beautiful because it fits one of the brand colors. Even though only 58 people responded to this question, 45 of them went with the green icon. I can only conclude that people naturally connect green with successful actions.
A bit over 62% of the respondents seem to have a preference for a cleaner style, as long as it contains important information, like the item’s price.
The feedback I got from the usability test of the web app regarded mostly visibility issues. Users didn’t seem to get the expected response when clicking on the rectangles below the floor plan. I had used a light grey to highlight those, which I changed to (the Ikea) yellow after the test. The same went for the “2D”, “3D” and “walk” icons on the left side of the screen. Most users hadn’t seen those icons, so I switched the color of the working icon to yellow, as the users felt those features were important.
Also, because the users mentioned it was somewhat confusing to know where to find the items saved in the mobile app in the web app, I added a welcome screen to the web app with some explanation, as shown above.
In the end…
The final result is a product I believe fits both the Ikea style and its cross-channel content strategy. Additionally, because its structure is a nod towards other IKEA apps, the Scan & Plan tool would be easy for customers to use. Most importantly, this all-in-one hybrid app would support the company’s goal to increase profit by creating emotional connections with the brand.
Retrospective
I must admit the problem I worked on in this Design Case wasn’t my first choice. Or second. Or even third. Ikea, on the other hand, was my first choice. Initially, I thought about the hassle it is to purchase products from Ikea, whether it’s the long wait to get your products delivered or the endless stroll around the store to get to your products. But I found out that my assumption that everyone else experienced this was a problem was really just that: an assumption.
Also, I realized once more that the more you see and the more you read, the more inspired you get. There are so many fascinating minds out there. And many of them share their ideas in this platform. Many others might be reading this article right now — and most certainly thinking of ways to improve it.
So long and thanks for all the fish
I’m very happy I went through this Design boot camp experience. It was intense but so worth it. Thanks to everyone who was somehow part of it. I really appreciate your support and patience. Special thanks go to my unicorn teachers ♠Milan van den Bovenkamp♥ and Alienor de Haan, to my dear parents, and to my lovely friends Leonie Hanemaaijer, Maria Dias Pinto, Ana Cecilia, Márcia de Sá and Sheylla Batista. I couldn’t have done this without you ❤
