Top Families are vital to IKEA's business. They are foundational, evergreen product families that support the rest of the product range and make radical affordability possible. My brief was to tell the story of each Top Family on IKEA.com.
Users struggle to understand which product family would be best for their needs. The benefits, differences, and unique stories are either hard to find or absent from the e-commerce experience.
I wanted each product family to speak for itself—both visually and in copy. By pushing for an emotional design pyramid approach; I wanted to start with just one product family to keep it manageable, quality-focused, and most importantly simpler and faster to validate. From the beginning, we decided it would be tested with users before we scaled up to more product families. We used modern web frameworks like GSAP that allowed us to create an interactive, animation-driven experience to tell product stories that hadn't been told before in a way that hadn't been done before.
I ran dozens of interviews with product designers, product developers, and communication experts to uncover the story of each product family. I wanted to create a behind-the-scenes look at how each family came into existence and what its unique features were so the design could effectively convey the value to customers. I believed that if we effectively communicated the story of each family, customers would be more informed and inspired, and could make better purchase decisions leading to a higher average order value. Knowing the value of a product means knowing if that product is valuable to you.
Buying furniture can be a rational process. But I learned that first and foremost it's an emotional process. If we don't fall in love with the form, function, or associations we have with a product, then we may never move on to the rational phase. We tested this hypothesis and ultimately found that customers had a strong, emotional, and positive reaction to the bold and expressive design of each Top Family page. The results showed that this was not just good communication, it was good for the average order value.
