IKEA has an omni-channel visitation challenge with total visitation decreasing 10% FYTD. Local search presents an opportunity, but IKEA ranks poorly.
Branded local "IKEA near me" and "IKEA store" search demand declining while generic "furniture store near me" fairing better. For "furniture stores near me", IKEA ranks 17th on average, with only 50% of markets ranking on page 1 results.
Experience reviews aid in local search ranking, but we don't give customers an outlet to publicly share their experience, so they go to Social Media, Reddit, Google+, Yelp, etc. posting either the worst of the worst or the best of the best.
IKEA's experience lags the market
Home Depot's trifecta of product, store, and service reviews instill buyer confidence on multiple levels. Raymour's use of store reviews in external listings encourages consideration and higher CTRs from Google. Ashley Furniture's store reviews programs contribute to it's high ranking local store page.
The goals
Build a Store Experience Reviews platform to grow feedback around store experience and publish it to encourage interaction and visitation by influencing prospective shoppers' decision on where to shop.
U.S. Customers utilize user-generated content as a comprehensive, multi-channel series of touch-points, central in their decision-making process along the path to purchase
Here are a few of the activities I facilitated so that our team could work collaboratively and speed up the collection of insights.
Kickoff with the team
Framing the problem, providing context, and kicking off the project with collaboration so we got together as a team and we each picked from a list of our top U.S. competitors and explored what they all did when I came to Store Experience Reviews on both mobile and desktop
Comparative feature list
From this initial discovery were able to create a table that showed the full breadth of this feature and which competitors were the strongest in the space.
Userzoom surveys
We learned weather our customers understood the concept of store reviews, what our customers were expecting from a store reviews feature set, what review content was most relevant, in what order, and their preferences for list views, default sorting, filtering, and other data.
Feature criteria
Compiled the benchmarking, the comparative feature list, the survey results, and best practices from Baymard and NN/g to come up with the feature criteria for Store Experience Reviews.
Now that we had a good idea of the feature criteria for MVP, it was time to establish some design principles to help guide us through the rest of the process.
The best way for us to track purchases events and have legal right to communicate with our customers would be to cross reference their IKEA Family account.
We know our customers are already receiving product specific review requests, we should coordinate with marketing & communications to ensure we aren’t perceived as spamming.
Use the content and context of experience reviews to drive positive changes to the in-store customer experience with the help of store management.
Team activity
Coordinated a collaborative session with our team members, stakeholders, and our vendor to ensure a realistic user journey map through multiple channels in both happy paths and sad paths.This also helped us better understand the deliverables from a tech and design perspective.
If this, then that!
After the local store's page redesign, there was a significant improvement in several key performance indicators (KPIs), indicating a successful redesign.
1. Respond to all negative reviews (1-2) within 2-24 hours based on severity for customer resolution to mitigate customer escalation
2. Respond to a portion of neutral and positive (3-5 stars) within 24-72 hours to reinforce customer appreciation
1. Meet weekly to address immediate issues and celebrate positive experiences
2. Meet monthly and tertially to track rating and sentiment trends, understand performance against department/drivers, and develop action/recognition plans
Component chunk approach
We had a good understanding of the bits and pieces that would form the overall feature, now it would just be a matter of designing the pieces, to do this I took each section or component individually and then built my way up. Always gathering feedback along the way.
Would you like some chocolate?
We did some store exit intercept surveys and bribed customers with candy so that we could have a better understanding of what factors had the most impact to the customers visitation and store satisfaction. With the help of store management we refined the list of what we would later call Store Satisfaction Drivers
Methodology
Qualitative/Quantitative: In-store intercept study
Understand what drives store visitation and satisfaction
15 Participants
Ages ranging 18 - 55+
Located in the United States
Study Results
Thanks to our store intercept study we identified the factors that drove store visitation for our customers and dubbed it "Store Satisfaction Drivers", and we organized these in order of priority:
1. Quick Checkout
2. Availability
3. Co-worker Friendliness
4. Store Cleanliness
5. Store Atmosphere
Initial pilot goals
Results
We define these as reviews that had a rating of 4 and 5 stars.
We aggregated all store reviews and calculated the average.
We aggregated all store ratings and calculated the average.
We aggregated all store recommendation percentages and calculated the average.
This project was the first UGC type product launched by the US IKEA digital hub and it was an absolute blast to have the opportunity to collaborate and co-create with my amazing team comprised of developers, product owners and data scientists.
Thinking about this strategically, it has set the stage for other UGC projects that we are working on in tandem as we had started just early enough that we have been able to build conventions for partnerships with 3rd party providers, design new components, improve old components and establish customer expectations through communication guidelines.
Future
Thinking about the future of this project we are hoping to:
"I managed Frankelly for several years at IKEA. During this time, he consistently demonstrated initiative and dedication as a Senior Product UX Designer, particularly in his efforts to understand customer needs and align them with business objectives"
"His empathy and desire to understand the users resulted in intuitive and desirable interfaces that were quickly adopted by stakeholders. If I were to build my Product Team today, no doubt, Frankelly would be the first designer I would ask to come on board!"
"I had the great pleasure of being on the same team as Frankelly at eMoney. I found that his designs always addressed the various stakeholders' requests, while ultimately keeping the user in the forefront."
"Frankelly lives and breathes the user experience. He has an amazing talent for taking a challenging and cumbersome experience and turning it into something simple and enjoyable for all users."
"His passion for bringing joyful user experiences to everyone is what separates him from other designers. His keen ability to perform interviews and usability tests with users will lead to comfortable, well-designed user experiences."
"He is also a very wonderful person to work with. He is personable, collaborative, and supportive of all his teammates. He is eager to learn from others and has an excellent understanding of how to best partner with User Research."
"Working with Frankelly has been a true pleasure. He is super easy to work with, dedicated, hardworking, and shows a true eye for design. He always strives to create solutions that are both visually striking, but also simple and intuitive."
"Frankelly is a true team player and collaborator, he fostered a positive work environment and encouraged collaboration among all team members. His positive attitude and dedication to his craft made him a pleasure to work with."
I'm always open for new projects, collaborations, talking shop or
just a friendly hello 😊