Design Study: Furniture Assembly
Ikea Furniture Assembly Application
The team aimed at creating an application that created a more user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, time-saving experience for users assembling Ikea furniture.
The team conducted an initial contextual inquiry to understand how users currently put together Ikea furniture, then followed up with user testing of the application Spencer created.
*All participants agreed to be photographed and use their first names.
Final Designs
1: Start of Application
As a user starts the assembly process, they are greeted with a familiar Ikea-style greeting. The application aims at being informative and quick, allowing for a short guide and tools necessary.
Through exploratory user research, the team found that many users were hoping to see the final product of the furniture they were assembling. The finished product orientation view helped to fill that pain point.
The team also found that users responded well to short, informative "pop-ups". This would be built out more and used more effectively in a production version of the application.
2: List Features
The team found that users were frustrated by the lack of labeling and understandability of the default paper manual. This was addressed by finding a way to include labels and a list of boards, tools, and items.
The colors were picked based on the color blind vision simulator. Through this simulation, the colors proved to be effective in their intention for all users.
3: Rotation View
A major feature of the team's application was the ability to rotate the part at whatever step the user was currently on.
This allows them to see which boards were supposed to be where, along with the items that were currently in use.
To be fully usable during the study, Spencer created this feature for every step in the manual.
After the study, it was found that users only viewed this feature when totally stuck. When the users did use the feature, they found it useful.
4: Finishing the Assembly
You can see the final steps of the assembly here. The goal of the manual was to allow users the ability to fluidly move across the manual, going back at any time when they did not understand.
Once completed, the team included the ability to start a new furniture item, as per an insight learned during the exploration portion of the study.
Application User Testing
Users were asked to assemble the furniture item using only the application via Figma on an iPhone.
They were asked to "Think aloud" during the study, while also exploring the features of the application.
The users were observed during the study, given NASA TLX form afterward, and given a short structured interview.
Method / Results
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Initial Contextual Inquiries (Exploration)
User Personas
Initial Prototyping
