The IKEA Homepage
During our last module, called ‘Interactive User Experience’, we had the chance to work for IKEA, one of the biggest furniture stores in the world. IKEA started in Sweden, which is still resembled in their design, efficiency and price. It’s a great company that receives a lot of love, and hasn’t got that many enemies. And it is exactly there for they’re a difficult client. IKEA manages to deliver cheap furniture that is durable and well designed. It has branches across the globe. It pays a lot of attention to green energy, re-using old furniture and clean materials. Apart from that they spend a huge amount of money on advertising, hiring the best companies to bring marvelous campaigns and tv-commercials like the lamp, IKEA in the Sims, and Obama’s new oval office.
You can imagine it’s not that easy to find a hole in their company, and area they didn’t pay enough attention to. We did a lot of research, and found one new area where IKEA is missing: social media online. After a lot of brainstorming and prototyping, we came up with our solution: IKEA Homepage.
We made IKEA responsible for organizing your life online, same as they organize our living in real life. The IKEA Homepage would gather all online services: your mail would fall in your mailbox, your feeds you could see as a newspaper, status updates from Facebook or Twitter would be hanging on the cardboard, your photos would be managed in photo albums. The power lay in the coverage: it doesn’t matter if you would use Facebook or Orkut, if you would use Twitter or Plurk, if you would use Digg or StumbleUpon, or Flickr or Picasa. All services would be implemented in the homepage, and you would use them in the same way.
The whole room would be furnished with IKEA furniture. You could add or change furniture, and choose from all catalogues ever made. Apart from that, you could also share your room with your friends, giving them inspiration for their own room, or for your next birthday present.
We presented our solution to IKEA at the end of our module. Their reaction was not what we expected but correct and understandable. They found the movie was missing a lot of our concept, e.g. the sharing solutions wasn’t mentioned at all. It wasn’t until we told them about the extra features, that they were convinced it was a good idea. We learned a great lesson in presenting. The movie had a bigger wow-effect than needed, and because we were all so excited about the outcome, we didn’t notice some basic features weren’t mentioned. Apart from that I also learned a great deal in working in group, developing in 3D and producing a case movie. The group I worked with was great, we all felt bad when the module was over, since we would be divided into new groups. But we still have the memories of a great module, and a solutions we’re still really proud of.
Read more about my adventures on Hyper Island on my blog.
