A chatbot helps remind people of key steps and solve some major types of problems in furniture assembly.

RESEARCH

Understand the problems and challenges

How many people prefer to assemble IKEA furniture on their own?

How people rate the user experience of IKEA guide books?

What people most care about when they are looking for assistance?

Survey

Goal: to get an overall knowledge of my product's potential scope and design opportunities.

29 Responses

Results

76% of participants assemble the IKEA furniture by themselves.

56% of participants give a rating 4 (very hard) for the difficulty of assembling furniture.

88% of participants most care about images in guide books.

The survey shows that most people are still not satisfied with IKEA guide books and have met some difficulties in the past assembly experience.

Interview

Goal: to learn more details about IKEA guide book’s drawbacks and improvement possibilities.

1 in person + 2 remote

Findings

User behavior in furniture assembly

All users will browse through the entire guide books first to get a general sense of the process, and then follow up each step carefully.

Two users think the whole assembly process will be more efficient if they can remember multiple steps at once.

Pain points of IKEA guide books

Complicated steps are hard to remember.

No written instructions. Interpreting the diagrams can be difficult.

Sometimes gadgets in guide books are not distinguishable.

Mirror problem: hard to specify the orientation of certain parts.

Expectations toward an assistant

Including videos or a 3D animated process.

Tips on how to propose things up when doing by self.

Knowing which angle should be working from.

Having concise and easy to understand wording guidance.

PERSONA

This chatbot is a friendly and helpful furniture assembly assistant that provides efficient extra instruction besides IKEA guide books. It has a low level of personification, which could serve as a more intuitive tool using conversational user experience design compared with image-only interaction.

Benchmarks

Efficient: make the furniture assembly easier and help users save time.

Accurate: give the correct and understandable instruction for each step.

Always available: users can get access to the chatbot whenever they have problems.

Patient: the chatbot should be detailed, not to skip too much process.

Direct: provide clear guidance instead of wordy sentences.

Low Personification

Efficiency is the fundamental feature of the chatbot. This IKEA assistant should give users information quickly and correctly. So a none-human-like character will be appropriate.

Power Dynamics

The chatbot should be activated all the time when users assemble their furniture. It should always monitor the step that the user is currently doing and give prompt, useful, and appropriate feedback.

Tone

Serious: give users a sense of professional and reliable.

Casual: the chatbot is used in home, which is the personal space.

Respectful: fully understand what the user needs.

Matter-of-fact: factual information matters most for this chatbot.

Character Traits

Helpful: ask users whether they have questions proactively in the confusing steps.

Encouraging: give users clues and inspire them to continue even if the process is dull.

Tolerant: let users feel it is always here no matter how many problems they meet.

Omnipotent: should have all-round skills and reply informatively.

INTERACTION MODEL

Slots, Intents, and Utterances

The stickers in green color were what I added after the usability testing.

FLOW DIAGRAMS

PROTYTYPE

After brainstorming some sample scrips, I began to write dialogs for the chatbot. Due to the time limitation, I focused the sample conversations on two features:

Help understand the image and find out the correct screws

Help check the direction of the board in the previous step

botsociety

Click here to interact with the prototype

USABILITY TESTING

2 synchronously interview + 3 unsynchronously questionnaire

Findings

Things that still lack in current design

It would be better to have more customized procedures instead of always choosing from different tabs.

Since the instruction pictures are printed in the book, if users are stuck to the step, seeing the same image isn't going to help.

"visually videos would be better than back and forth text."

Pain points of the current design

Sometimes when there are multiple elements, it's hard to tell which ones are for the pictures.

There are some steps where users want to see what it looks like with the physical product vs. pictures on a screen.

Recommendations

Include zoomed-in or real photos of which elements users are supposed to use.

The user experience process could be: getting the product, scanning QR code, launching step by step video of a real furniture.

Provide access for users to tap to skip steps and make sure steps are always aligned with the manual.

Videos, 3D models, or real products are not existing in the IKEA assembly guide system, but in the future, if IKEA provides these features for furniture, this chatbot will also add that.

ITERATION

botsociety

Click here to view the new prototype

Flow Diagram

The original flow was to let users type which step they are doing, however, typing words is difficult when their hands are occupied with furniture elements. So I decided to present all steps individually, and if users have no problem, they can simply tap the button to skip this step.

For the checking intent, I planned to add a feature that users can take a photo of their current situation and upload to the chatbot, and then the back-end recognition system can automatically analyze whether it is right or wrong.

View the flow diagram again

FUTURE THOUGHTS

From my perspective, designing more customized paths for chatbot will make the interaction model more complicated with more varieties. Though it will be hard to write utterances for all intents, what conversational developers can do is to apply machine learning or other algorithms to train the chatbox to recognize keywords more accurately and thus learn what people say.