IKEA’s website has gone through a facelift a while ago, and I’ll call it a facelift because it was mostly for beauty and not so much for usability.
The good news? Now you can get lost on IKEA’s website the same way you do in their stores.
There are many things wrong with this new IKEA website so grab your meatballs, FYND a chair, lean back, this will be a long series.
As a tiny teaser: for a while there was no colour filter which was especially entertaining whilst looking for kitchen cupboard doors. The METHOD kitchen cupboard system has 1255 search results for the word ‘Method låge’ (door). That got fixed, so many other things, however did not.
In this post I’ll tackle my biggest bugbear: the new menu.
Where are the icons?
For some strange reason the design decision was made to go from using icons and labels to just labels. For comparison’s sake, here is the old design that was still being used on the Hungarian IKEA site for a bit.
You know who — mainly — benefits from icons on IKEA sites? Internationals. Just look at the above screenshot; even if you don’t speak the language you would know where most of those links take you, wouldn’t you?
Let’s get user persona-l
I wonder, is there really no user persona drawn up by the IKEA website UX team that just says:
‘Expat who’s just moved to a completely new country starting a new life == buying a lot of our furniture.’
Migration within the EU (80% of IKEA’s sales are in Europe) is pretty common and sometimes you do end up in a country where you don’t (yet) speak the language.
But it’s not just a language thing. For which, by the way, it would be nice if you could introduce a simple language picker. Since the IKEA website is available in many countries in many languages it wouldn’t even be a massive deal to translate between languages. Or just have an English one at least:
It could fit nicely next to the unlabelled auxiliary icons
Icons also make good targets for touch and make recognition faster.
Conclusion
Yes, UX research shows that icons are not terribly useful…on their own! Don’t believe me? Let’s see then what a slightly more well-known person in UX has had to say about this topic:
“Icon plus label is superior to icon alone or label alone. “ — Don Norman
I do recommend reading Don Norman’s whole essay(from 2015!) where the quote is from. He writes about the issue that is still alive and well in the design community: where we started going towards “pretty looks” all the while destroying ease of use and understanding. He mentions Apple explicitly and unfortunately many designers see what Apple does and copy them. I personally think it also doesn’t help that most places are hiring UI/UX Designers instead of a UI Designer and a UX’er. Finding someone who’s good at both is pretty much impossible, therefore teams tend hire whom we used to call Graphic Designers as their portfolios will be much more visually impressive than a UX Designer’s wireframes that look like the stick figure equivalent of shiny UIs.
Note: After many months they’ve updated the Rooms menu to include some pictures. Tiny, tiny pictures.
Bright side
I would be remiss to mention that there are good things about the new navigation. It is a lot more organised now. For instance, compared to the very busy Hungarian menu the new one has a separate Rooms and Products navigation item (the Hungarian menu says ‘All rooms/products’).
Number of main nav items are also better/fewer:
- Old: 10 + 5 secondary
- New: 4
It does mean you have to click more to get to what you are actually looking for and the chance of taking the wrong turn therefore is greater, not helped by the search algorithm being buggy and often quite unhelpful.
Target lost in translation
The fly in the accessibility ointment comes when you use Google Translate to translate the page to English. If you do that the menu’s text links are no longer clickable, only their padding (the few pixel space on their left and right). Fun.
Note: this bug has now been fixed.
Notes
This article was written 3 years ago. A lot of it is unfortunately, pretty relevant.
I realise this whole post might come off as an English speaker complaining that not everyone speaks English. First off, English is my second language. Secondly, I did learn Danish eventually but as Danish rented houses mostly come unfurnished I kind of needed a bed before I knew the word seng.
