Partner Project

Ikea Home Insurance

This project involved the team by starting with the basic core research of the users of this product. By integrating insurance with a company solely known for selling furniture, we knew that we had to investigate how we can attract these users to be interested in purchasing this insurance. We wanted to make sure we captured everything needed from the user to bring trust in the product. As IKEA is not known for selling insurance, this was also a challenge as users might not align that IKEA as a brand would have the full knowledge of insurance_

Requirement

Partner Delivery

Goal

Build White Label System

Deliverables

IKEA Insurance Site

Year

2019

Start with the basics

I have managed teams that try to jump into the project by solving everything with design without the fundamental research behind it. Some designers lack this essential work, and I have seen many projects that never reach their full potential. One thing I got right was to get the team to start from the beginning on understanding their users and then designing "for them" rather than "to them"_

We needed to build something for scalability as this was our first partner project and would set the foundations for upcoming projects as we would use this as the base for our white label system. With challenges, we had to build a core design system as we were creating this project

As we were starting from the beginning, we had to intricately align with the developers on our components and ensure they were building our core system. We had to ensure we documented everything on our components to reduce technical debt

We conducted many research papers to help build the journey and structure of our white-label products. It was now the opportunity to use this research and create the trip we envisioned for our white-label products

Implementing the core principles of our design process was crucial for this project. As the new team, we had to come together quickly to define what we wanted to achieve in an optimal user journey and UX experience

Understand the key learnings

I believe that we cannot cater to every need and pain point of the user, but we need to understand as a team what are the pitfalls of the application. In doing so, we need to analyze where we can improve our MVP solution and enhance as we go along with correct agile methodologyies to help us. If the team analyses the customer journey from end to end, we can see that there is always room for improvements in the application that enhancements can achieve_

Partner Personas

We had to analyse our core personas needed for this project as we had base personas from the previous research conducted, but because we were integrating into a partners platform, we had to look at how are the main types of users and then adapt them to our market segment allowing us to cater content structured to our primary persona_

Clean UI

We wanted to ensure our white-label insurance solution dealt with the many issues we found on previous sites. We wanted to ensure our UI is clean, operational and not cluttered, a typical pattern with digital insurance products. As our core foundation, this UI allowed all UI white-label projects to adhere to this setup_

Video Banners

We wanted also to deliver a video banner to make the site professional and creative. We went to the partner to assist with this as IKEA had the setup to create films. Through brainstorming and ideations with the partner, we completed the video banner, which we serve as the video banner on the website_

Laying the foundation

This project gave so much to the team in how we will set ourselves within iptiQ. It gave us the foundations on what we needed to set up to deliver UI with label solutions and how to optimise our work with the development teams. As we were operating as a centralised UX unit, it was a different setup to having the squad model like many other companies_

We saw great learning on setting up our foundations to help hand over designs and alignment discussions. We had to formulate also our discovery sessions and how we bring in all stakeholders to align on ideas and features

We had to opportunity to set up the design system from the beginning. We also had to develop a way to design prototypes to switch brands easily, as we used the white-label solution for all UI projects

The most significant learning was how we brought teams together to discover new ideas and present research. It was the first time some developers had worked with such as UX team that had data to back up their design claims

The project is a real example of UX. We didn't touch any designs until the research was completed, and we iterated and aligned on all design ideas to get our MVP and still get the feature to operate as we designed it