Define and design a desirable user experience for IKEA co-workers learning in the workflow
Inter IKEA ∙ UX designer ∙ 1 year and 6 months
Worked with
- 3 other UX designers
- Product owner
- IA architects
- Development team
- Content creators
- Learning designers
- Co-workers on the shopfloor
Methods
- Interviews & co-creation sessions with co-workers
- Journey workshops with content creators and learning designers
- Storytelling through design case stories
- Concept designs for connected content
Context
IKEA is a strong brand with unique culture and values. Over time IKEA has developed a large knowledge base and many trainings for co-workers, to secure the brand, and the culture and values. Unfortunately, research shows that many co-workers cannot easily find relevant knowledge and learning. The Co-worker Content Experience (CCX) programme wanted to create a co-worker centric platform to make the content more accessible, usable, integrated, personalised and meaningful for the IKEA co-worker. The proposed solution was to build one destination for co-workers to access the content in their moment of need and in their workflow.
Outcomes
With input from user research and with help of co-creation workshops we created design cases to illustrate and share our envisioned solutions about how co-workers might easily access knowledge and learning in the future. The design cases were storyboards that showed a co-worker doing a specific task in a specific context and using easily accessible information to get the job done.
The envisioned solutions were for a far future. In parallel to creating these design stories we designed and implemented a portal that contained and connected knowledge and learning from several different sources. We developed this portal in small steps, validating with co-workers along the way, and iterating on design and development.
Challenges
IKEA is a large organisation and the CCX programme had big ambitions. Challenges abound!
One challenge was finding ways to collaborate and co-create with the many content creators. Existing knowledge and learning content was created as stand-alone information. The content had to become more flexible to be relevant to co-workers in their workflow. I co-organised several co-creation workshops with content creators to discover and show how content could be modularised and connected.
Another challenge was working within and across the programme's multi-disciplinary teams. We had to find ways to combine the small-steps, quick-paced UI development on the one hand with the big-steps, slow-paced IA development on the other. I helped find and maintain common ground by bringing in relevant use cases and organising them as focus point for collaboration.