How IKEA Fulfils Customers’ Dreams Through Research Democratization

Introduction

The vision of IKEA is to “create a better everyday life for many people.” To offer a common product range to a global market, IKEA needs to understand what “better” means to the majority of the people it aims to cater to. For this, it is essential to gain insights into their needs and living conditions. IKEA’s main product development centre is located in the southern part of Sweden. There, specialized home furnishing business units focused on different home areas and their related activities develop the global product range. To acquire the insights needed for product development, each business unit conducts qualitative and quantitative studies about the specific needs of their unit.

IKEA has been conducting home visits since the 1970s to learn about people’s everyday struggles and needs. The majority of these home visits are carried out by employees who work in the retail environment, including those in communication or sales, as well as the national administrative office. By understanding how people live in the areas where their customers reside, IKEA stores can better market their offerings in relevant ways. The information gathered is used to build room sets in-store and develop communication materials. Additionally, IKEA’s consumer and market research units use home visits as part of their qualitative research to gain a global understanding of life at home.

In 2017, an independent Swedish foundation called Gapminder gave a presentation to IKEA’s product development and design teams. They demonstrated their online platform, Dollar Street, which features photos of people’s homes categorized by income level. The IKEA team was impressed by the platform’s direct visual impact. They found it powerful to see snapshots of people’s daily lives from all over the world and to compare activities in different parts of the world in relation to people’s incomes. This made it clear that people all over the world are more similar than different. The product development and design teams immediately requested a similar tool that could give them comparable information about IKEA-related activities, such as cleaning, cooking, and sleeping, which are the activities that take place during daily life at home.

This was when development began of an IKEA-specific platform, eventually known as Open Home, pulling inspiration from the simplicity and the direct visual impact of Dollar Street. In developing Open Home, the goal was to provide a direct understanding of how people perform their daily activities in different markets. This is what product developers and designers need in their work in order to make products that better customers’ everyday lives all over the world.

Objective

The purpose of developing the Open Home platform was to provide different business units of the IKEA organization with global data and insights obtained from home visits. This would enable IKEA to offer products and services that are more relevant to customers, ultimately contributing to a better everyday life for them. By obtaining outside views, IKEA would gain a better understanding of the reality of customers’ lives. The platform would gather data that would allow IKEA to capture and aggregate its extensive knowledge about how people live across the globe. This information would then be made more readily available to the entire IKEA organization. Moreover, the knowledge would also enhance employees’ interest and awareness of how people live.

IKEA identified the following requirements to met the objectives of the Open Home platform:

• The first objective in creating the new platform for home visit data was to establish a single, unified platform for all IKEA units globally.
• The second objective was to develop a platform that could be used both by professional and nonprofessional researchers.
• A flexible and reliable platform for global management that can accommodate varying business needs and local legal requirements.

Development journey

The aim was to create a platform where users, in this case, product development teams, could search for a combination of variables related to IKEA’s strategy. To obtain data, IKEA partnered with Gapminder and conducted home visits in India. Their objective was to develop a minimal viable product (MVP) that could be tested with users. The result would be to provide a visual outcome of the combinations the user was interested in. For instance, they looked at how families with children living in small spaces in a particular market solved their storage needs in their living rooms. They explored how the solution would vary if a user looked at different income levels or whether a family rented or owned their home.

The administrative side of the solution had to be simple, self-explanatory, and fast to document home visits. At the same time, there needed to be consistency in how the data was gathered to allow for flexibility between the various markets and their specific needs.

Initially, there was a plan to connect the available knowledge to the content of the home visit. When researchers conducted home visits in India, they investigated documenting air pollution and its effects on life at home. This knowledge about air pollution and health would be made available to the users. However, after testing, they discovered that this feature would make the platform too complicated to be efficient. So, the development of the platform continued with a focus on documenting home visits only.

The tech strategy – how it was built

The core team aimed to keep the technical side of the development simple and flexible, allowing them to respond to user feedback quickly. To achieve this, the team’s technical experts worked closely with users throughout the process.

By keeping the team small and focused, they were able to work with agility, breaking the project down into small increments and collaborating effectively. This approach allowed the team to work quickly and efficiently.

From the outset, the team had an ambition to reach the entire IKEA world, and they built the platform with scalability and expansion in mind. The production architecture always followed the corporate environment setup.

The pilot

The core team of Open Home wanted to ensure a smooth global launch, so they decided to roll out a pilot version to twelve markets over three months. During this period, the core team and the national administrators in the participating countries worked closely together.

The national administrators introduced Open Home to the teams in their markets with the support of the core team. Based on the feedback and learnings from the pilot, they developed new support materials that were later introduced to all markets through deep-dive sessions.

One of the key learnings from the pilot was the need for recruitment support. Based on this input, developers integrated a recruitment process into the tool, with a link that can be posted on any communication. They also further developed the tool to address questions about how to analyze the results.

Interestingly, there were almost no problems or questions about how to use the tool. It appeared to be self-explanatory to all testers.

Challenges

Democratising the solution

IKEA’s Open Home initiative aimed to make consumer research accessible to all employees worldwide. This involved planning, recruitment, visits, and data analysis by the employees themselves. However, ensuring the quality of data collected by employees posed a significant challenge in designing the platform. Therefore, a systematic and coherent approach was necessary to collect data effectively and maintain consistency in data analysis.

Data privacy

“IKEA’s Open Home project had a potential to share real-life stories in order to increase engagement within the organization. However, in doing so, they faced a dilemma of balancing privacy standards with the desire to create an inclusive and open solution that would emotionally engage people. While personal stories were important, it was also vital to respect people’s personal integrity and data privacy requirements and laws. The challenge was to connect emotionally with individuals while also respecting their privacy. Simply presenting data was not enough.”

A usable solution for many countries

As a precondition for providing Open Home to various IKEA countries, it was necessary to build a solution with high-security standards. Since IKEA developed Open Home in-house with partners, it provided a lot of flexibility to build different functionalities but also brought a lot of responsibility in terms of following high quality and security standards.

During the development process, the team had a continuous focus on various security components connected to infrastructure, procedures, and data processing. Collaborating with third parties ensured an objective approach to development.

Open Home is a solution that stores personal data, which requires extra effort to secure different local requirements when working with personal data. The core team conducted many workshops in order to identify a global privacy setup to embed in the design by working intensively with different legal and privacy teams. Additionally, the team needed to create a flexible structure of privacy components since there was no unique approach that could fit all different countries. This provided an overview of which data they could collect and who could consume and view different data based on various criteria, such as role, country, legal entity, and more. This created a synergy between processing personal data in the best way and creating business value for IKEA.

Methods

Data collection

The process of collecting data is quick and easy. Prior to the home visit, the respondent (either an individual or a family being interviewed) is asked to answer some basic questions and grant permission to use their data. This is done through an online form they receive via email. After submitting the form, their data is linked to the upcoming home visit in Open Home. The respondents can also upload photos if they wish to do so.

The following data is collected during the process:

– Country

– Type of home

– Size of home

– Areas within the home

– Whether the home is rented or owned

– Number of family members

– Monthly income per family after tax

– Living situation (single, couple, with children, living together)

– Name and address

The team also identified four “points of interest” during the interview. These points of interest are:

– Favorite spot

– Most-loved item

– Point of frustration

– The dream (what they would do if they were able to change one thing in their home)

Collaboration and user support

Open Home is a project that involves democratizing research by allowing IKEA employees to conduct their home visits. To ensure that the visits are done, Open Home provides support materials such as documents and videos that explain why and how IKEA does home visits.

The platform also provides an overview of potential respondents, making it easy to align screening and recruitment with project objectives. The discussion guide also provides examples that can inspire the home visit team. With these resources, the home visit team can conduct organized and successful home visits.

During the home visits, the team starts by understanding who lives in the household and what is important to them. After that, they move on to the role of the home and then delve into the activities of interest or areas of the home, rather than focusing solely on the sofa or other areas of interest. Open Home makes it easy to tag and structure the collected photos and stories, allowing users to sort findings and identify common patterns.

Results

The global launch of Open Home in spring 2023 provided home visit data to IKEA’s business units in 62 markets, meeting legal demands and ensuring high security. Noteworthy patterns emerged from approximately 13,000 photos, revealing insights into customer needs and preferences across different market segments. The platform allows for sharing data and learning from co-workers in other markets, and is successfully used by professional and non-professional researchers.