Ad-hoc qualitative feedback solutions.

Project: Researching and recommending feedback solutions that IKEA can implement across Australia to obtain ad-hoc qualitative data.

Client: IKEA Australia

Overview:  A report showcasing surveys, user interviews, affinity mapping, personas, customer journey maps and the like was developed in order to walk the stakeholders through the journey that arrived at the solutions recommended. 

If you'd like to view the research plan and report in full, feel free to download a copy! 

The brief

Currently, IKEA gathers customer feedback through a global standardised feedback channel which provides IKEA a standard view of customers satisfaction and consumer perception around the world.

The brief given to me focused on new methods for capturing customer feedback in an ad-hoc fashion. The feedback captured is to be used to support decision making in IKEA Australia, at a local level.

IKEA wanted to explore ways of gathering insights, feedback and ideas from organic and pre-selected groups of IKEA customers. This initiative would also contribute to IKEA’s goals to promote an open and transparent communication channel and long-term relationship building with their customers.

I was asked to conduct research to understand how IKEA customers might use a feedback channel as described above, research IKEA customers and their behaviors/needs/motivations in relation to the feedback, conduct an audit on their current channels and to provide recommendations that advises IKEA on what approach to take to achieve their ad-hoc feedback goals.

Client stakeholder interview

In order to understand the client's objectives, needs and vision for this project, a client stakeholder interview was conducted. It furthered the understanding of the client brief, background of the company, their long term objectives, internal processes, what's been done before and their understanding of their customers.

The existing user information they had on hand through their current feedback channels was also queried during the one hour session, but it was found that while they get about 4,000 feedback surveys sent to their Pulse CX system every week, the data they collected was mostly quantitative and the "why" behind this  abundant feedback wasn't there even though they needed it to translate into actionable insights based on each business decision.  From here, as the business objectives were clearly identified, it allowed the research plan to be created with a research objective in mind. 

Key learnings

• Understanding the client's needs is the first step to identifying the UX opportunity that lies within the venn diagram between the client's needs as well as the user's needs.

• Sometimes, asking each question expands the scope of the project, so questions that narrow down the focus and direction of the project by identifying primary and secondary priorities are needed.

Limitations

Key learnings

• It's important to identify any limitations so that the stakeholders can judge the quality of the insights as well as how it can be built upon if there's a particular point of interest. 
  
• Prefacing limitations to your research showcases to the clients that different angles to your research have been explored in an unbiased manner, allowing for more informed decision-making on their part.

Before any research was conducted, some limitations were observed and needed to be taken into consideration.

As I'm based in New Zealand, the recruitment of Australian locals proved to be an arduous task. Recruitment took place via social networking, and ultimately, there would be bias in the data gathered for the surveys, user interviews and usability tests.

Another cause for concern is the scarce amount of participants interviewed and surveyed. Although not statiscally significant, courses in the UX industry have identified that generally, only 5 to 6 interviews are required per persona to give a solid foundation that showcases the patterns and trends required to form the basis of these personas. Due to my inability to visit the stores in person, the feedback surveys available on the happy-or-not kiosks were photographed by another researcher from Harness Projects conducting the same research for usage.

Another limitation identified was that all the sessions were conducted remotely. I was unable to go through the existing feedback channels with the participants in person during the usability tests, so the facilitation and moderation of such sessions may have caused indirect effects on the participants, causing potential bias.

Lastly, the limitation of time needs to be considered. This research project was conducted after work hours in the span of a short 7 weeks in conjunction with UX course work. If the research was conducted for a longer period, there'd be more data collected for more robust findings. However, the research report I developed should set the foundation and direction for any future research tasks, despite being conducted over a short time-span. According to a friend who currently works at IKEA, it seems as though this was truly the case, with the below recommendations slowly being rolled-out.

Data gathered

Through the methodologies listed in the research plan, data was gathered through two different surveys on two different platforms (Typeform and Google Forms), desktop research, user interviews and usability tests of existing feedback channels and points. This gathered data was then sorted using affinity mapping, which made the data more organised in preparation for research analysis.

Key learnings

• It's less time-consuming to conduct research analysis when all the data is organised through affinity mapping. 
  

• It's important to use a range of research tools to inform the recommendations and ergo, decisions made as it provides robust research-backed initiatives. 
  E.g.  Finding out that  60% of people surveyed expect a form of acknowledgement doesn't identify the "why" behind it. Through research, it was found that the users needed this to validate that their feedback has been received correctly and that their feedback is taken seriously.

Research analysis - Personas, CJMs & Empathy map

Key learnings

• Sometimes there can be gaps in what people say they do and what they actually do, and it's important to dive deeper and take note of this discrepancy. 
  
• The aforementioned gaps may identify other issues that should be addressed by the company and pose other urgent priorities or projects in the future.
  
• Personas and customer journey maps allow the researcher and other stakeholders to refer back upon to ensure all the decision making is relevant and useful to said personas, which should encapsulate the majority of the audience for each particular business decision. 

Through the data gathered, notable findings were noted down, graphs were created and the reasons behind certain behaviours and motivations were explored and recorded. Empathising with the users provided a foundation for which personas, customer journey maps and an empathy map were created from, which would inform the rest of the UX journey. 

Based on all the findings thus far, personas that would allow the researcher and designer to empathise with throughout the journey were created. As IKEA already has their own set of personas to work with, these were more snapshots of the personas identified in my research. The personas actually ended up being vastly different to what was expected in the "Participants" section of my research plan. This was a particular point that was of interest when I presented my recommendations back to the client as it deviated from the research plan. However, once explained, it allowed for better discussions around the topic. 

Customer journey maps were also created in order to identify the users' pain points, thoughts, actions throughout the process and the UX opportunities that were applicable to each section of the journey. 

An empathy map was created based on the data gathered in order to gain a deeper insight into the people interviewed. Here, it's evident that there is a gap between what people say they do (with regards to feedback) and what they actually do. It can also be seen that each person's thoughts and feelings regarding feedback have commonalities based on root beliefs. For example, those who are hesitant to provide feedback feel as though they are just a drop in the bucket, while those that enjoy giving feedback hope for their opinions to matter and make a change. These both indicate that there exists a wall between businesses and consumers, in that people believe they have to be active and develop a trustworthy reputation before their opinions hold any weight. It would be fairly important to counter these misconceptions through engagement and an image revamp for IKEA to inspire consumers to co-create, as the consumers need to feel valued.

UX audit

A UX audit was done in order to examine IKEA's current feedback channels, how their customers interacted with them, and their general process effectiveness.

Investigating their presentation and locations in-store, their survey contents, their website feedback page and virtual assistant, issues of consistency, length, accessibility and wording bias were identified. During this investigation, I also idenfitied certain faulty links within the website producing a large blue error screen with an error code and no means to troubleshoot, violating UX best practice. This alarmed Giovanni when it was presented to him, and he was able to troubleshoot it thereafter.

Key learnings

• When presenting an audit, sometimes the client already knows about certain issues that surround a particular part of their process or offerings, however, it's best to be thorough and take time explaining important elements in case there are areas of surprise for them. This was true for the faulty links and error pages that Giovanni didn't know about in this instance. 
  

• Presenting an audit in an unbiased manner allows the clients to objectively look at their processes and offerings with an open-mind for change. Sometimes it needs to be presented before them backed by user usability testing before it's evident that something needs to be done instead of feeding into the idea of "if it's not broke, don't fix it".

Recommendations

After clarifying the key insights derived from the research, it informed the recommendations I made to Giovanni and Louise. 

It was clear that besides exploring new paths and methods to gain the ad hoc feedback that they need, they also needd to improve on their existing channels, so my recommendations came in these two categories.

In terms of exploring new paths, I was able to weave in what their direct and indirect competitors were doing to achieve the business objectives we had identified. This showcased what's already been done and received success so that the effectiveness of the recommendation could be understood. In order for Giovanni, who said he's not really "up with the times sometimes" to understand certain medias, the presentation showcased a lot of pictures and even a video so that he really understood the recommendations provided.

As their budget was taken into consideration, besides recommendations that could be explored in the future as they gain more budget and traction, there were also those that could be easily implemented within their current feedback channels with little to no added cost.  

Key learnings

• Recommendations should not only be focused on achieving business objectives and addressing user needs as the business may not have the budget to implement them. It's important to make recommendations that are viable based on the company's current limitations like budget in this case.

• Recommendations for the future in which they can look to implement when they have the budget are also welcomed, but needs to be explained that it should be done in conjunction with those that can be applied in the short-term. 
  

• It's important to present information in a way that everyone present would understand, so the use of photos or videos may be necessary.
  

• Presenting with a slide focused on key insights allows the room to go back to the slide for an in-depth discussion focused on the main points at hand. 

Reflections

I am truly excited to say that the research conducted was able to answer the issues established in the brief for IKEA. I received great feedback, especially because I not only looked at their large competitors, but also small boutique competitors that are on the rise as well. They were also particularly fond of one of my simpler recommendations that they can implement easily without the need of a budget: The fill-in-the-blanks one liner. 

It was such a good feeling when I saw IKEA adopting some of the recommendations shortly after the presentation like taking advantage of Instagram polls to gain some simple ad hoc feedback. I'm excited to see where their implementation of UX takes them.

Interested in working together? Get in touch!

Aska Lai
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UX/UI Product designer
aska.j.lai@hotmail.com

Proficiencies
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Figma
Figjam
Miro
Jira
Confluence
Photoshop
[Currently learning] Blender