Redesigning IKEA Comfort Guide

Could you pick up your ideal mattress online?

In collaboration with Elke Albers, Jasper Kense, Sinyoung Ahn, and Yunzhao Ma
2021: 5 months
Part of Msc Design for Interaction at Delft University of Technology
Activities: problem definition, interaction vision, design brief, redesign, and evaluation

Our team created the following redesign for IKEA's comfort guide

IKEA's original design

We were asked by IKEA to redesign their comfort guide (see screenshots below), an online tool to help customers pick out mattresses, pillows, and duvets.

Problem statement

Through user tests, we evaluated the original comfort guide and defined its main issues.

Design goal

To solve these issues, we came up with the following design goal.

Current interaction

The current interaction (left on image) with the product feels like trying to play a board game without having read the manual. You are left on your own to figure out what all the game elements are for and how to use them to reach the end of the game.

Intended interaction

We want to change this into a more guided, trustworthy, and straightforward interaction. The interaction with our redesign (right on image) of the comfort guide should feel like having a friend introduce you to a new board game.

Redesign

The redesigned interface is divided into two sections. One section asks the questions to the user in a chatbot form to make it feel more like a personal conversation. The other section shows how your answers change the selection of comfort products suitable for you.

Several small user tests were conducted to evaluate our design decisions. The main concerns were how the users would feel about talking to a chatbot and whether they understood the selection shown. Quick prototypes were built for these user tests using paper, WhatsApp, and Figma.

Four different iterations

Evaluation

Through a final user test, we aimed to determine whether our redesign fulfilled the design goal. The test setup consisted of four parts, as shown in the diagram below. The results were compared to those of the original comfort guide to evaluate whether the redesign improved the user experience. Furthermore, they were used to see which elements of the redesign could be improved further.