Overview

This project is part of a UX challenge brief by Ideate Labs I seeked out to better my skills as a designer. The task is to redesign the IKEA mobile apps, including IKEA - an ecommerce app, and IKEA Place - an AR app.

Problem

As countries go into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IKEA has to rely more on online sales as it surged 60% in 2020. As a result, the mobile app’s experience needs to be improved for more:

Risk diversification

Diversify sales point: Guard against pandemic lockdown regulation.
Diversify customer group: Attract younger customers who prefer buying online.

Service Optimization

IKEA low cost model is sustained by depending on customer self-service. The app with in-store assisstance features will:

Make self-service easier
Reduce idle time for workers
Optimize services at high scalability

Discover

Competitive Analysis

Since IKEA is a brick-and-mortal-native retailer, I did a competitve analysis on an online-native retailer MADE.com that focuses heavily on the mobile app and AR experience.

I compared the IKEA app against the competitor’s based on the 3 key stages of an e-commerce platform :

Search
Evaluation: I focused on the AR features, as users would check if the furniture would fit into their home before buying.
Checkout

User Personna

Method of shopping is a good indicator of the user’s priority (speed over physical experience, assurance), and their pain points linking directly to the specific marketplace (i.e. delivery issues for online, self-serve difficulty for in-store shopping)

Profiles for 3 key target customers are based on their main shopping method:

Online shopper
Hybrid (Find inspiration online and buy in-store)
In-store shopper

Define

I defined different areas of improvement according to the user feedbacks and in-store observation. I then evaluated the priority of each project through 2 frameworks:

Impact-Effort Matrix
Innovation Matrix

The incremental improvements (stock alert, accomodate large quantity order) have the highest return because they solve the biggest current pain points.

Due to the limited time and resource, I decided to focus on developing 2 features . Although they require more effort, they have the potential to disrupt the way people shop and create new market. Furthermore, the features are also most in line with the problem assigned.

Intergrating the E-commerce and AR app: Because of the pandemic, people need better AR feature to shop online.
Virtual Shopping Assistant: automates and makes self-service easier.