IKEA
Design the perfect living space from the comfort and safety of your home
THE PROBLEM
TIMELINE
Summer internship with Ikea's AR/VR Team.
ROLE
How might we create the perfect living space using AR technology?
With Augmented Reality, Ikea has the ability to help customers explore and envision a personalized space.
Product Design Intern, Focus area: Research
TEAM
Phil G. - Product Manager
Qing G.- Product Designer
Yacine A.- Software Engineer
KEY GOAL
AR/VR technology is rapidly growing and with a world-wide pandemic the need has become even more apparent to bring the physical into digital experiences. This product allows the user to select a room and decorate it virtually using furniture from Ikea's online catalog.
Research and Interaction design
APP Store
Overview
Product Design Intern
Ikea is a Swedish multinational conglomerate that sells home accessories, ready-to-assemble furniture, and kitchen appliances among other things with an annual revenue of $40B euros. For eight weeks, I was a product design intern for IKEA's AR excelerator. My focus was on uncovering pain-points, and designing solutions during onboarding, and first time user moments. Collaborating closely with the PM/Eng/UX stakeholders, we researched and designed a better end-to-end experience in the setup, onboarding, product placement, and conversion phases.
Research
Rapid, remote usability studies
The team rapidly iterated on product improvements and needed to understand:
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Why are users specifically abandoning the picture processing phase?
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Can users successfully take a panoramic picture and place an item inside?
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Can users place items inside rooms and interact within the room?
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Why do users resume or abandon decorating rooms?
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Can users place/move furniture and does latency impact the experience?
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Can the user execute the flow from beginning to end?
Because of COVID, we were unable to do in-person usability tests to discover pain points, so we pivoted conducting remote unmoderated usability tests to identify issues within the various flows and to rapidly iterate on the findings. By conducting 30 usability studies per day, and fast following with developer updates, we were able to identify and resolve issues with the algorithms, flows and micro-interactions. One of the key challenges for this product was the need to educate the users on how to use AR technology in the onboarding phase. To solve this problem, we created an in-app video that showed the user how to calibrate their camera and take pictures.
Designs
One of the major pain points for users was the rotation feature. Working synchronously with our dev team, we quickly took in the user feedback, designed and pushed out our feature updates. We experimented with different rotation models to help users understand the capability and where to grab the component.
Designs
Prepare the space
Capture the image
Manipulate furniture
Research revealed where users needed key affordances and guided flows to understand:
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How to prepare the space to create the best capture.
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How to take panoramic pictures to capture the perfect 3D image of the room.
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How to manipulate the furniture once it is in the room.
STRENGTHS
Users enjoyed the experience and spent an average of 6 minutes decorating their room.
The ease of interacting with the decorating experience and how useful it was for them because of:
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Risks during COVID-19
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Visualization of furniture pieces within their home.
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They didn't want to take their children to the store.
KEY LEARNINGS
WEAKNESSES
Users expected the ability to filter and search for products.
Users expected the rotation of furniture to be easier.
Users want to decorate an entire room and will therefore find the limits of technology.
Users want and expect to test all the product in Ikea's online store.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Create a "how to video" for capturing a room.
Create a "product walk through" for the decorating phase.
Provide an affordance with system status during image processing
Add filter/categorization of furniture to improve navigation
What worked? What didn't work and why?
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Static stepper
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These didn’t work because we couldn’t show the user how specifically calibrate their camera and take the pictures.
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In App Video
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An in-app video that showed the user how to calibrate their camera and take picture
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Designs
Demonstrated flow on how to:
1. Prepare their space
2. Orient and calibrate the camera
3. How to "decorate" their space.
IMPACT
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Increased multi-step task completion rate by 80%
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Increased customer satisfaction by 14pp
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Apple App Store rating 4.6 stars