IKEA Singapore Redesign (Personal Project)
Guest Contribution
OVERVIEW
Ikea is a Swedish furniture store that prides itself on creating multi-functional furniture that can be brought home in flat packages and assembled easily. Most people go to Ikea for affordable furniture and knick knacks to jazz up their homes. The stores are user friendly and organized but unfortunately, their website is not. Hence, I decided to redesign the Ikea Singapore website.
USER RESEARCH
I wanted to find out what people like about the physical store so that I could incorporate it in the website. Thus, I began my research to understand the company and the users more. Ikea is a company that puts in a lot of work to understand its users and their behaviours to make furniture that would save space and make their lives more functional. A lot of users go to Ikea to walk through the showrooms and get a visual of what their homes could look like. Users also like being able to enter a showroom, see a piece of furniture they like, test it out, and find the price and dimensions of it easily.
Overall, it seems that users enjoy the Ikea experience because they can go at their own pace. They can go straight for the item if they know what they want or they can take their time exploring the showrooms to get inspiration.
PERSONAS
Using my research, I created two personas. The first one is Josh who is looking for a bookcase to fit a certain corner of his house. Josh is a novelist and only has time to be on the computer when his kids are at school. Hence, he doesn’t have much time to look for a bookcase that fits perfectly in the empty space in his house.
The second persona is Karen, a newlywed who is excited to furnish her first home but is overwhelmed by decisions and remembering what furniture she picked for which room. These personas helped me shape certain decisions that I will explain further down below.
DESIGN
Navigation Bar
The first thing I did was change the navigation bar. I made the bar blue to match the logo and made it more cohesive. I made the search bar really prominent as according to econsultancy, about 30% of visitors will use the site search box. Also, by analyzing the user searches, Ikea can shape their users’ experience through customised banners and ads. I also placed the user account, saved items and cart icons next to it so that easily accessible to the users.
Categories
The next thing I did was re-categorizing the navigation buttons for the site. I researched various furniture sites and decided to categorize the items similarly to those sites, to make it more familiar and easier to navigate for the users.
Filter Box
Going back to Josh, the first persona who is looking for a specific sized bookcase, I decided to add search by dimension in the filter box. This makes it easier for him as he doesn’t have to look through pages of bookcases and hover on each of them to find one that fits the space. Thus, preventing frustration and making it more likely for him to visit the site again. I also shifted the filter box to the left so that it is easily accessible.
Boards
For Karen, the second persona who is overwhelmed with planning the furniture for the house and keeping it within her budget, I created a save items page with boards similar to Pinterest. With this, she can create boards for different rooms and have a clear visual of what furniture she picked for which room.
I added the total price of the items she saved in the board, so that she can easily refer to it and keep track of her budget. I also placed an add to cart icon on the board, so that Karen can easily add all the items in the board to her cart instead of clicking it one a time.
Inspiration page
Finally, to incorporate what users like about the showrooms in Ikea, I designed the inspiration page similar to a showroom where users can look at the images for inspiration and easily find the price of the item at the side.
Thanks for checking out my portfolio!
Feel free to get in touch!
mia.shairanie@gmail.com
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