Reinventing IKEA’s Digital Experience
For the first team based project during the UX Design Immersive course at General Assembly, we were briefed to create an interactive, greyscale prototype of the IKEA website.
Working closely with two other UX design students, each team member worked on multiple areas of the project, showcasing soft and hard skills we had learned during the course. I was specifically responsible for conducting user interviews, data synthesis, ideation and paper prototyping, as well as creating the high fidelity wireframe.
The Problem
“How might we let users find and buy IKEA products online, now and in the future, with confidence?”
The Solution
“Through the creation of an advanced search function and customisable personal mood boards, IKEA customers are able to find and save items of interest, and purchase them now or in the future.”
Select this link to view our clickable prototype or read on to learn more about the design process.
Discovery
About Ikea
Founded in 1943 in Älmhult, Sweden, IKEA is the world’s largest furniture retailer. They have been present in the Australian market since 1975, with stores in all mainland states, as well as Canberra. Worldwide, they own and operate 415 stores in 49 countries.
Contextual Analysis
To start, we attended the IKEA Richmond store to better understand the in-store customer experience with the aim of observing other customers, as well as gaining insights from our own interactions with the store and products. We noted that there were different sections designed to inspire potential customers, ranging from the heavily styled showcase rooms to the more functional groupings items of similar product families. There was a big emphasis on warm messaging, centred around welcoming IKEA into your home, with rooms styled based on existing real life rooms.
User Interviews
Following our contextual observation, we interviewed a broad range of people about their experience and expectations for e-commerce solutions, as well as any first hand experiences they have had in store at IKEA.
Definition
Key Findings
Our key findings from user interviews were threefold:
Our major finding was that there are two kinds of users, those who know what they want (ie they have to meet an immediate need), and those who are purely seeking inspiration.
Interestingly, the user who knew what they wanted were still open to inspiration, whether that took the form of simply colour and style of the product they wanted or more generally, for example looking for related products.
Most importantly, the user can be converted from seeking inspiration to committed purchaser and back at any point throughout the journey.
Further, we identified that a large percentage of users seek inspiration for purchasing through a number of different areas including Pinterest and Instagram. This was confirmed by our team members previous experience in the homewares and fashion retail spaces.
Lastly, we identified that people often used the online shopping cart as a shortlist of sorts, and that the purchasing timeline from initial idea to final purchase can take up to two years.
Development
Ideation
With our problem statement in mind, we undertook time boxed ideation processes to rapidly identify potential features and solutions to our users problems. After this rapid ideation, we created a High Impact / Low Impact — Expected / Unexpected feature prioritisation matrix to determine which of the features we needed to include in our minimum viable product.
1st priority — High Impact & Expected
- Return policy
- Reviews
- Explanation of post purchase process
- “Other users bought…” suggestions
- Ikea profile
- Design document
2nd priority — High Impact & Not expected
- Wishlist for future purchases
- Separate “Inspiration” vs “Know what I want” experiences
- Advanced search ie.Searchable by dimensions or number of chairs for a table, etc.
- Different styles of delivering products to users including IKEA hacks, styled imagery and products on their own
Delivery
Paper Prototyping
After determining our required features, we started sketching screens for usability testing. We undertook two rounds of usability testing identifying a number of positives and negatives, and iterated upon our design at the conclusion of each round of testing.
What worked?
- The journey from the homepage to the dashboard
- Saving items to mood boards
- Using the search bar both on the homepage and in the “My Idea” dashboard to search for items
- Use the global nav categories to search
- Utilising “Others also bought..” and “Featured products” to get more inspiration and view other products in the IKEA range
What didn’t work & solutions
Selection of topics in the interests page
- Added hierarchy to the text
- Changed requirement of three selections to one selection to continue, as well as giving option to skip that stage
Set mood board names were too limiting
- Allowed users to create their own, incorporating an auto-complete function
After thorough testing and iteration, we were confident that our paper prototype met our previously defined problem. From here, I took to creating hi fidelity wireframes in Sketch.
Select this link to view our clickable prototype.
Where next?
Areas for further usability research in current prototype:
- The use of colour, motion and prioritisation to aid learnability of the website
- Login to My IKEA process - what they see first
- Further develop the visual design of personalised boards
- Further iterations of microcopy
Ideas for future development and implementation:
6 months
- Live chat bot — especially on large ticketed items
- Product durability rating
- Assembly difficulty rating
- Marketing campaign #myideasmyikea
12 months
“My Ikea” to be populated with additional experiences such as:
- Video / AR walkthrough of room/house
- Interactive itemised tagged images
- Incorporation of “Ikea hack” community ideas
The Team:
About me:
Hi! I’m Pat, I am a Melbourne based experience designer. I’ve recently pivoted to this space after ten years working in the music industry as a DJ, event promoter, touring agent and more.
I am driven by experiences, collaborative practice, and I am a strong believer in the power of communities. I love meeting new people, and honestly believe you can never have too many connections in life, so feel free to hit me up on Linkedin :)
