Creating an omnichannel experience for the many

Explore the full case study in Figma

Project

Since the start of 2022, I’ve been a member of the Personalisation team within Customer Engagement, serving as the Product UX Designer. In this role, I’ve been tasked with conceptualizing, implementing, and expanding both our existing initiatives and upcoming projects.

Our team collaborates with market partners and stakeholders worldwide and across various disciplines.  My primary responsibility has been to assist in defining our mission, designing initial prototypes, and ensuring their scalability.

Deliverables

 • High-fidelity interactive prototypes
 • Competitive analysis
 • User surveys
 • Personas
 • User journeys and task flows
 • Low-fidelity wireframes
 • High-fidelity mockups and prototypes
 • Research and findings

Tools

 • Figma
 • Miro
 • UserZoom
 • Contentsquare
 • Origami Studios
 • Adobe After Effects

Situation

The Personalisation team at IKEA had primarily focused on development, but with the introduction of the Customer Engagement sub-domain, there was an increased need for UX resources. The team aimed to create a cohesive experience for every customer across all channels.
Our team mission

Whenever a customer is identified at any touchpoint, ​we will enable relevant content ​so that the overall IKEA experience moves the customer forward on their journey.

Task

 I was responsible for researching what Personalisation entails and communicating this with the team to ensure alignment. We needed to discover impactful concepts to improve customer engagement on the IKEA homepage.

Action

We conducted workshops to combine data points and brainstorm ideas, ultimately deciding to focus on iterating the homepage. Our research highlighted pain points such as the difficulty customers faced in finding previously viewed products and the lack of awareness about IKEA Family benefits. We developed a prototype for a personalized homepage greeting, which included a recently viewed carousel and prompts for new customers to join IKEA Family. This prototype was tested through an A/B test across 12 markets.

Result

The A/B test showed positive results, including increased total revenue per conversion, higher click-through rates on the personalized component, a slight increase in account creations, and a generally favorable perception of value in local markets. This success led us to refine our MVP approach further, incorporating local market feedback to ensure both regional and global relevance.

Next steps

As we reach new milestones, new questions need to be answered. What content should be prioritized to best serve our audience next to recently viewed? How can we effectively choose the next-best campaign to recommend to each customer through strategic segmentation? Our next steps involve a personalised journey that will expands into major categories like Bathroom, Bedroom, Storage, etc. But before we can do that we need to gain a beter understanding into our customers—how can we for example tailor our communication style to fit their preferences and speak their language? Additionally, we still need to explore further the value we provide to logged-in customers also works for our vustomer who aren’t logged in. 

Adapting content to the Customer

User testing revealed that a generalized approach to content isn’t always well-received. For instance, during a major Christmas campaign, we found that not all users celebrate Christmas, and preferred not seeing it. This highlighted the need to tailor our campaign messages to fit individual customer preferences. By utilizing customer segmentation, we aim to deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time.

Our research has identified several methods to develop this segmentation model. These insights will help us create a customer model capable of effectively segmenting our current customer base. Additionally, my team and I have conducted more detailed research to demonstrate how this model will function in practice.

Adapting content to the Journey

Understanding the customer and knowing what they want to see, is one thing. Another thing we need to understand is how far along their Journey they are. Is the customer just looking around? Is he already committed to that one piece in the collection? Is he looking for aftercare information? All these questions have different answers and have different needs to solve them.  This intention impacts the content being delivered and helps the customer narrow down that journey. We truly believe in the Personalisation team that no journey is ever binary.
 
In the examples below, I highlighted three phases of the kitchen journey on mobile: the inspiration phase, the explore phase, and the deciding phase.
A Journey is never binary 

In each phase of the customer journey, we want to be adaptive and show the best possible next-best-action. If a customer is exploring our kitchen range, we want to provide inspirational content. When a customer moves along on their journey so does the content.