Case Study: Digitising IKEA
Guest Contribution
The e-commerce experience
The challenge
Bring e-commerce functionality to the Australian Ikea website, while upholding the Ikea brand identity and addressing user needs and values.
IKEA: Brand and concept.
IKEA is driven by its business idea “to offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them”.
My role
In this project, I participated in every phase of the project.
I collaborated with 4 other team members throughout the design process.
I came up with the idea of having an instructional video to assist users in assembling their purchased products.
In prototype stage, I created the digital wireframes for Product Page that was scalable to over 100 product items.
Process
Looking for the answers
The first phase was empathising with the users, we went through the IKEA’s current website to experience the user journeys using different scenarios. By doing so, it allowed us to identify the basics of e-commerce that we can bring to the IKEA’s website.
Following that, we did contextual analysis on IKEA customers at their Richmond store. Then, we interviewed a 4 IKEA customers and 2 IKEA staff.
Our key insights were:
- Customers research online before visiting the store. They also seek advice from friends
- Customers enjoy the products combinations showrooms that IKEA creates in-store
- IKEA in-store experience offer inspiration and peace of mind. As customers are able to imagine how the products will fit in their rooms
- Many customers have difficulty locating products
- Didn’t want to walk through the whole store to get to where they want to go For eg) getting a specific product and checkout
- Uncertainty of in-store stock availability
- Cost and efficiency of delivery service and assembly
Defining insights and their importance to users
From our analysis, we decided to tackle the problems below as they were mentioned more times than the rest. Then, we ranked them by importance to the users.
- online research experience?—?people find value in viewing products (they also mentioned clickable products and dimensional views) online before visiting IKEA store and consulting other people for opinions.
- instructions for assembly (available but could not locate and not as comprehensible)
- difficulty locating products (lengthy/complicated route and arrangement of products on the floor affect customers ability to locate a specific products)
- lower delivery cost or free delivery?—?some customers will receive more value if free delivery is being offered.
Brainstorming for ideas and feasibility analysis
While we were doing ideation, we kept many of the existing website features because we went with the motto “if it is not broken, don’t fix it”. However, we added additional features to exemplify an e-commerce website that was aimed to solve the 4 key focus areas discovered in our findings. Below are the additional features:
- Airtasker function
- Smooth payment process
- Instructional video on assembly
- Frihet membership options
- Wishlist
- Sending notifications to users when desired items are close by.
Prototyping
In the prototyping phase, I was responsible for Product Page design. I designed it by abiding with our core concept which is “keeping layout and information simple and clean”.
Below are two examples of wireframes from the Product Page:
The Future
Although we have very powerful solutions to resolve the pain points of the users, we still need further testing and iteration to perfect the online experience of the users.
We set out to-dos as follows:
- dive into more development of IKEA application to support finding items in the physical store
- beta testing on member benefits and price, taking into account the impact of these benefits on the cost of the business
- better integration with Airtasker in terms of delivery and assembly
- 1-click purchase
- roll out pop-up stores to bring IKEA products to users’ proximity
Reflections
In this project, I have learnt that users testing play a crucial role in perfecting the prototype to the most user-friendly level. During users testing, it is important to keep in mind that we should not be leading the users through the process but rather giving the users some tasks to complete and observe their journey in completing the tasks. By doing so, we will be able to understand their thought process better and how they make decisions based on the prototype.
Having this awareness is vital as a UX Designer because by understanding the users’ decision-making process based on a prototype can tell us a lot about how other people make their decision too.
Knowing that, we will be able to iterate more accurately on our prototype to reflect users needs.
Powered by WPeMatico
