Ikea.com: an almost excellent site
January 23rd, 2010 | Published in Web Design, usability
My husband and I recently purchased our first home and realized we could use a couple of new pieces of furniture. We decided a trip to Ikea was in order since we like what they have and we don’t like to pay that much.
Since the closest Ikea to us is several hours away and we were going to try to cram a lot of stuff into a little car, I headed over to Ikea’s website to do a bit of research. I was happy with what I found and on a whole, the site was really helpful, providing almost every piece of info I needed.
A few pros:
Easy search: When you search for a specific item, like a sofa table, it pulls up a page with thumbnails, price and relevant links for all items matching that search. I found it to be a super easy way to quickly find what I want.
Stock availability: I LOVE this feature. Simply find an item you want, select your store and away you go. This tool is crucial when you’re traveling to the store from long distances.
Shopping list: If you sign up for an Ikea account you can save you’re favorite items in a handy shopping list to print out when you come to the store. The list tallies prices and tells you where in the store you can find the item, which my husband and I found to be immensely helpful.
Few things in life are perfect and that goes for this site too. While it has a lot going for it, the site does have a few quirks that I found irritating, especially as I continued using the site.
The cons:
Hidden content: I spent some time randomly looking at the site just to see what else they offered. As I went through sections I kept seeing products in the photos that I couldn’t find anywhere else on the site. Turns out that the product thumbnails are shown below the Flash areas and on a laptop there is no way to easily see that they are there without scrolling. Now, I support the idea that people will scroll, but you do have to at least visually indicate that there is content worth scrolling for. I was to the point of almost abandoning ship before I finally scrolled down.
How to shop: I had been to Ikea before, but it had been several years and I wanted to see if they had made any changes to check out and bagging. After much searching I finally found a how to shop at ikea page. It told me a lot of things, but didn’t answer my biggest question—do they provide bags or not. I never did find that info and subsequently forgot to bring bags to the store. Thankfully you can buy some there, but since I have a ton of reusable bags at home I didn’t really need more.
If you’re going to Ikea I recommend checking out their site first. It’s helpful, easy to use and with just a bit more tweaking I’m sure it can achieve excellence.