Context

The trigger for starting this project came to my life without any special invitations. I moved to London 🇬🇧 to take a UX design course at the General Assembly, I rented an apartment and it became obvious that my apartment needed some extra furniture. No sooner said than done, a week later I was having fun with IKEA instructions while assembling furniture.

My new lamp assembling wasn't the hardest part of my weekend that went under the title "IKEA instructions & chill", but it was an 💡 aha moment of finding real-life problems for my final project at the General Assembly. The next day I happily notified UX design mentors that my final project topic was found.

Project Steps

GA project performance is structured around a simple workflow: doing research/design in class and at home, analysing findings and putting everything into a home assignment file every Saturday; getting feedback from course mentors, discussing project ups and downs during weekly 💬 stand up (discussions) with classmates and mentors, repeating the circle.

For moving through research/design steps we used the 💎💎 Double Diamond model: discover, define, develop and deliver. That wasn't (and never could be) a linear process but to simplify the visualisation of my workflow, let's imagine all design steps as a linear process.

Problem Statement

The problem definition phase seems boring or pointless when you already want to jump into a research and design process, but it is a project basement. I kept a core of problem definition statements in my mind's eye from the beginning to the project end /😸 UX designers know that a design development will never end/.

The problem I was suspect is that people usually have trouble understanding assembly instructions for furniture and home accessories bought at retailers like IKEA or JYSK. People who order furniture from IKEA or JYSK are unlikely to use assembly services. Neither IKEA nor JYSK officially provide assembly services.

BACKGROUND:
IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. IKEA became popular since they sell cheap ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories.
People like IKEA prices, but they usually find it difficult to assembly IKEA stuff. IKEA furniture and home accessories are the most affordable for people of the middle-class (and lower) and they are not willing to pay extra for assembly services.

Also, IKEA doesn't provide an official 🔧 assembling service. IKEA business model affected the way IKEA makes and prints its assembly instructions. They use only monochrome printing which is cheaper than colour print, but on the other hand, it makes it more difficult for customers to read assembly booklets.

📝 Research Plan & Interview Notes

I was a little bit stressed before conducting my first in-person user interview but I kept in mind a simple truth heard from my GA lectures: "Give to your user a safe environment to talk about their problems and listen to them". This rule worked perfectly all the time. UX designer's job in user interviews is to ask the right questions, listen to, ask the user "why" as much as possible, listen and listen once again.

I found out that interviewing isn't rocket science ONLY if you have empathy, you are a good listener, being able to ask open-ended questions and you are enthusiastic as a child about a research problem! Words cannot express my feelings 😸 during user interviews when people were telling me how they tried to find video instructions on YouTube for IKEA furniture. It's so clear that sometimes people already have a solution to the problem so you need just to find the right question.

Research Questions:
1. How do people assembly 🛋 furniture and home accessories from IKEA?
2. How often people have trouble with assembling stuff from IKEA?
3. What is the common problem with IKEA instructions 📄 ?
4. How 😾 people try to deal with any assembling problems?

🔍 Affinity Map & Findings

After finishing with the interview part I moved to affinity mapping for distilling findings and analysing them.

Factors that motivate people to buy stuff from IKEA:
1. Low cost 💰 of furniture and home accessories at IKEA.
2. The Scandinavian minimalistic 🛋 style of IKEA furniture and home accessories.
3. IKEA furniture 🚚 is easier to transport from one rented apartment to another.

⚙️ Contextual Inquiry

Contextual inquiries were not a mandatory part of the UX research at GA, but I kinda felt that it wouldn't be possible to move on without having data from a usability study. Especially considering the fact that I was researching for a real item and I had a chance to get a comprehensive picture for my research. Moreover, I assumed that it would be fun (it was rainy 🌧 wintertime in London).

For the first contextual inquiry, I asked a random guy from my local gym ⛹️‍♂️ to help me with a usability study. I truly didn't want to conduct a usability study at GA with my classmates or other students because it wouldn't be a pure experiment. All GA students are somehow connected with the design/research/tech industry so they'd be trying too hard to assemble a lamp like a "good user". I was a freshman in London so I had only one way and it was to ask strangers to participate in my research.

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that an IKEA lamp and its instruction became the main item for the contextual inquiry and my later research. Why? Just because it would be hard to carry a table across London 😸 so I chose something smaller.

🔩️ Contextual Inquiry #1

The first contextual inquiry was held right in the gym studio. A guy who agreed to help me was a little bit confused in the beginning. I assume my favor wasn't the most common for a personal gym trainer, but after I explained the point of the research, he was ready to be a part of the experiment.

Before starting an assembling process he saw an assembled lamp on the IKEA website for ⏰ 10 minutes so he had a notion how did that lamp look like. This contextual inquiry was held with IKEA printed instruction.

🔩 Contextual Inquiry #2

📌 I spent about the same time as that personal trainer did when I had my first assembling of the lamp and I was confused too with many similar parts of the lamp so I decided to put stickers with numbers on the parts of the lamp before conducting the second contextual inquiry.

For the usability study, I found a participant from the GA front desk staff. I did so because in that phase of the experiment it wasn't so important to have a participant from the non-design/tech industry.

📌 For increasing complexity of the challenge, the participant had no idea how the assembled lamp should look like. She had a paper instruction in hand. Every detail of the disassembled lamp was marked by me with a number in a logical order based on the paper instruction flow.

The second contextual inquiry result was 🎉incredible🎉! The time of the lamp assembling process decreased by MORE THAN HALF.

🔩️ 📸 Contextual Inquiry #3

📍 The next step was a contextual inquiry with video instructions and stickers with numbers on the parts of the lamp. Before proceeding to that stage I went through the main UX and UI design steps and it was supposed to be the last research phase for my IKEA project (as you remember the UX design isn't a linear process so I came back to discover/define stage).

Unfortunately, this contextual inquiry wasn't meant to happen because of the pandemic 😷 but I had a chance to 📸 film video instructions for the IKEA lamp at GA school.

📍 You can take a look at my ready 📹 video instruction of the Hölmo lamp on Instagram. I uploaded a series of videos as I planned to do so by the end of the UX design process. Research showed that people want to see the same functionality of an IKEA instructions app that would recall the features of the Instagram or TikTok app.

So it was supposed to be the simplest way to prove or disprove the need for video instructions. I can also assume that deeper 🔍 research with a higher number of participants in the contextual inquiry stage could show that adding stickers with numbers is enough for simplifying the whole assembling process.

📝 Analysis

Finding competitors was quite a challenging 👩🏼‍💻 process. The point is that I found neither user-friendly assembling instruction for furniture or home accessories nor video-instructions made by a retailer nor any official retailer app which helps with assembling.

There are a lot of videos with video instructions on YouTube made by altruistic users, but it can't cover up all furniture and home accessories items. Besides, I found that companies selling luxury furniture 💶 🛋 have non-user-friendly instructions too but their target audience is ready to pay for assembly service and luxury brands usually provide an official assembly service.

I found some schemes from a research article on how to make user-friendly instruction. Problem is that authors suggest using colours in assembling instructions but printing colour instructions will immediately increase 💸 the cost of the IKEA stuff.

Of course, it can be a colour 🎨 instruction available online, but in this case, a brand needs to have an app 📱 or a web page with a good mobile version. A great example of such an app is Bilt, but this generic app doesn't provide any IKEA instructions.

Personas, Storytelling and Storyboarding

For moving next to the feature prioritisation stage and starting my work with lo-fi prototypes, personas and user storytelling needed to be done. I even printed personas and user storytelling slides to have them in front of my eyes 👀 during all the following stages.

I found out it extremely helpful to have personas and user storytelling slides printed 📑 during times when working on a hard part of the design made my mind tired. I was returning to personas over and over again keeping my focus on user needs, not on my wishes for this app.

Problem statement:
Kavita Roy (primary persona) needs a way to have simple, clear, user-friendly assembly instructions for furniture and home accessories from IKEA because she has no time for long, stressful assembling sessions and no time for finding someone who can help to assembly stuff from IKEA.

📱 User Happy Path and Flow-Map

The user flow-map was redone at least 20 times. It started from a simple flow-map representing the user's happy path. But every couple of days I was getting new research data I went deeper and deeper to a full-fledged map. I finished my user flow map only after finishing a card-sorting and whiteboarding stages.

🗂 Card Sorting

Feature prioritisation was made by conducting two rounds of card-sorting.
📍 Card sorting research shows what most respondents would like to have in the IKEA assembling app:

1. 🔧 tools list;
2. 🔩 parts list;
3. ⏸ play/pause video option;
4. ⏩ video playback speed;
5. go to youtube channel option;
6. ⬇️ option to download content for using offline;
7. 🔇 option to turn on/off the sound;
8. 💬 live chat support.

After collecting the data from the first round of card sorting it became obvious that 60% of respondents would like to share their assembling results with friends. To figure out whether it is a useful feature to have an in-app timer ⏱ and option to share your assembling results on social media (and hence turning the assembling process into a fun challenging game) I did a second round of card sorting research. Besides, I wanted to find out do people want to use paper or 3D instructions instead of video instructions.

📍 The second round of cart sorting research shows what most respondents would like to have in the IKEA assembling app:

1. Voice 🔊over guidance of video instructions;
2. Option to go to the paper 📄 instruction mode;
3. Option to 🔍 zoom in and zoom out on a paused video for a better understanding of the assembling process;
4. Information screen on how many people do you need for assembling 👩‍🦱👩‍🦰 a big piece of furniture;
5. Sharing 📤 your results on social media after completing the process.

🖍 Whiteboarding

By the end of my card sorting research, it was clear that the next step was creating lo-fi prototypes but it was messing 🤯 with my head. I needed a magic tool that could help me to structure findings and somehow support me in the hard process of data visualising. Such a magic tool ✨ became whiteboarding.

One sunny ☀️ Saturday I came to GA school and I spent about 7 hours in front of a 🖍 whiteboard structuring all the research and creating lo-fi prototypes on the wall.

Digital Key Screens

After the whiteboarding session, I created lo-fi prototypes using the Procreate app on iPad and 🖊 Apple pencil. I prefer using that way for sketching instead of paper one because it is much quicker and cleaner. In Procreate I can copy-paste any element, separate sketches on different layers, remove any detail in two shakes etc. As a person who has more than 15 years of drawing experience, I prefer digital sketching for UX/UI processes.

Key screens also have full commenting sections in Figma like that:
1. If the user taps on some detail or instrument while scrolling the carousel, the user will see an information overlay window.
2. For closing this overlay window, the user needs to tap anywhere on the screen.

Comments to my sketches were so handy. They helped me to keep the focus on creating lo-fi prototypes instead of finding another new solution for a feature.

📱 Wireframes

My priority was to create wireframes, test them, change, test and repeat this circle rather than jumping into a hi-fi prototype. I felt that colourful UI elements would shift the focus away from UX design to UI 🎨 too early.
For lo-fi prototype, I designed 72 main app screens and prototyped them using InVision tools. I will be happy if you are gonna test it or just ⬇️ explore my work.

Hi-fi prototype

The process of UI mockups production started from creating the UI guideline that included fonts, elements and colours. The next step was implementing visual components into wireframes. I used Figma as I used it for wireframing and keeping the whole UX documentation in one collaborative space (I also shared my files with mentors during the course).

The next step was mockups prototyping and I used the InVision tool for that. The hi-fi prototype also had 3 user testings in-person. You may explore the hi-fi prototype following the link below.

Landing Page

I also created a landing page for my IKEA app concept. The core functionality of the landing page is to give a user basic information about the app and to redirect a user to the app store.