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Touchable Services - Ikea Notes Concept

The concept base itself upon people having a need for planning and discussing purchases that has a (larger) impact on their daily life, both socially and economically. There is a huge difference in planning the purchase of a sofa compared to purchasing a candle holder or a picture frame. What are the needs of tools for an individual or a couple furnishing their first apartment? How do those people discuss and negotiate their personal preferences, financial situation and time used to plan a trip to Ikea?

Our idea is to make it possible to tag, store and manage items you are considering to buy in an IKEA store in such a way that it is possible to discuss, compare different and variations of the same item (color, textiles, dimension, price range etc.). What information is useful? What information do you bring to Ikea and what information do you bring home with you from Ikea? How do you initiate and process the information in such a system?

This one week project was done in cooperation with Markus, David and Knut.

Research
As a start we had a small informal interview with another student at AHO Sigrun Vik, that has worked at Ikea’s kitchen department here in Oslo. She brought up several interesting observations around how the customers act, react, orientate and perceive Ikea. A list of some of the findings is listed below:

- A lot of people do not understand the Ikea coding system (blue tags are products in external storage, red tags are found in the storage inside the store)
- Not everyone understand they have to write down the product numbers they are interested in buying/picking up, causing a lot of confusion when trying to discuss it with an employee or when trying to find it in the storage department
- The 3D-kitchen planner tool is very popular among the customers
- The Ikea building(s) in itself is hard to navigate due to poor visual language
- Ikea has an employee standing in the entrance greeting people and is placed there to help people find way around the building. Yet, most people that get help are simply going to the next counter and ask for help again.
- The customers often have trouble describing/explaining the items they are discussing with employees (often have to take the employee with them to the displayed piece to show it)

Concept
The concept we presented on fridays presentation was a simple mobile interface that allowed the user to interact with the price-tags and posters found at Ikea.

The intention was to allow the customer to pick up and store the products he/she was interested in on his mobile-phone. The info displayed on the phone interface presented the product itself (visually), the basic information (dimension, location, price etc) and also allowed the user to write down short messages (like an SMS).

Once an item was picked up, the user could either keep it (save) or leave it. If keeping it, one would get the option of saving it in a category, i.e. “Todays session” or “my new kitchen.”

We mapped out two possible uses of such a service:
1) The customer could use it to navigate and keep track of items he/she needed to pick up at the storage before paying for it
2) It would allow the user to “take home” items for further discussions with his family, friends.

We also discussed the possibilities to add textile samples and colors on furniture so that it could be of direct use when discussing furnishing of the users home. (The scenarios are fully described and illustrated in the pdf-presentation: see url at the bottom of this post)

Beneath you will see some interface sketches for the idea described above:

1) Introduction Screen (left) and the initial menu (right). We chose to let the user get a saving option right away so he could set his “default” saving directory for the session easing up the workload when saving items later on

2) Once the user has picked up an item he gets the option of leaving it or saving it. He can at any time browse down to see all the info attached to that item before saving it (bottom left). If he chooses to save the item, the menu from the start shows up with his predetermined session/directory (as chosen at the start) making the saving a simple 2 click confirmation.

2) When an item has been saved, it is displayed on the mobile phone display. Using the left and right arrow allows the user to browse through all the saved items in that session/directory. Using the down key displays the additional information attached to the item (bottom images). Pressing the menu button will allow the user to skip to another session.

Downloads

Presentation: Presentation_IkeaNotes.pdf (9.3 MB)

Proudly presented by Knutta Jørgen

Touchable Services - Task Description

Background
Near Field Communication (NFC) will soon make it possible to connect the physical world to digital services. At the moment the mobile industry is thinking only about payment and ticketing, but there is a wide range of applications and services that could take advantage of this technology for other purposes.

Task
This task is about contextual research and conceptual design of services using the mobile phone as an interface to the physical world. We will work on ideas for services that combine digital information with the physical world.
The simplicity of NFC emerges from the fact that it works only at a short range, and this ties it to particular places or objects. What applications and services need to be usefully tied to specific places and objects? What kind of interaction are good for interacting between objects and our personal devices? How might existing signage, advertising and urban interfaces be complemented with local interaction?

Process
Choose a particular place or activity to observe, and base your ideas and concepts around that. You could for example choose a cafe,and work on ideas around the choosing, buying and consumption of food. Or choose a library and work around the finding and borrowing of books. It will be very helpful to spend time doing user research, in particular observation of everyday activity.

Deliverables
Find appropriate ways to explain your concept, particularly the user-experience. Use scenarios, videos, or some kind of experience prototypes to do this. Simple documentation of your user-research (photos, videos, diaries, etc.) should be produced. See www.nearfiled.org for write-ups of last years projects.

Equipment
We have Nokia RFID phones and as many RFID tags as you need to test out ideas and scenarios. We also have a collection of indoor, outdoor, card-based and people-based tags for you to use.