IKEA: Building Research Operations
Working with IKEA leadership to provide strategic UX research counsel, and build a comprehensive research operations framework for the company
3 months | 2 people
Overview
IKEA Marketing and Communications (IMC) is a department that’s part of IKEA, a Swedish-founded furniture company.
IMC’s role is to provide marketing and communication services to support IKEA’s retail website.
Objective
To increase the level of research maturity in IMC by collaborating with UX leadership and product teams to set up a best in class research practice within IKEA.
The main goal was to implement a research operations framework with standardised processes, methods, guides and tools that support and empower product teams to do excellent quality research.
The team + my role
I worked with one other UX Researcher on this project.
I collaborated with UX leadership and internal teams in IKEA to build out and drive the research framework and guides, and provide consultancy. In addition to this, I conducted interviews, analysed and synthesised research data, and created the user journey to find the guides.
Plan of building research ops
My colleague and I communicated the benefits of having research operations to senior leadership, which would ultimately help them make better business decisions. It would support researchers in planning, and give product teams clarity about what research approach and methods are being used at each stage within a lean UX process, to improve internal systems. It would also empower teams to socialise their research, giving increased awareness and impact of research across the organisation. We created a high level plan of our vision to set up, build and refine research operations for internal teams.
We first aligned our scope, KPI’s and objectives with stakeholders through a workshop, then conducted interviews with internal teams to identify areas where we could create the most impact for them. Off the back of the interviews, we then built the guides within the research framework for the teams to align on and work towards, with the aim to strengthen their practice. Lastly, we socialised our framework and guides to the wider teams so we could iterate and refine them based on feedback.
High level plan of implementing research operations (please click to expand)
The research framework
Our two key components within the research operations plan were: the research framework and the research repository.
This framework laid out the potential research could have for IKEA. It would allow teams to be more intentional about the research they are conducting, inform their vision and roadmap, and strengthen and scale UX expertise within IKEA. Product teams, UX researchers and designers could follow it when they needed to do research at any stage within the design process.
The research framework (please click to expand)
Interviewing internal teams + analysis
In order to figure out which guides to create, and the depth of them, we did a mini discovery. We held 13 interviews with internal staff from product teams to understand how they are currently doing research, and the people and systems they work with. It gave us a better idea of how to make the research framework and guides bespoke for them, and what levels of expertise to aim them at. Some of the top findings which arose from the interviews were:
The need for guidance, consistency and defined expectations of research
Help and guidance on convincing managers about the value of discovery work
A dedicated place to share and store research
A snapshot of the research analysis
The research guides + tiers
The guides were created in Confluence for each stage in the research framework, and allowed product teams to understand what they could do within each stage, the benefits, and the activities within them. They were a curation of tools, methodologies, resources and frameworks that equipped teams in IKEA to carry out key activities. One challenge was that they had to be understood by non-researchers too, so we ensured that we layered information appropriately when writing each guide, from the basics to advanced research, and a site map.
Below is the tiered approach we created for the guides, in line with the research framework. Tier 1 contains the fundamental guides that the team would benefit from, and Tier 2 were secondary supporting guides that would be written in future. The guides contained upcoming tools and techniques such as using atomic research and a usability testing canvas.
‘How to’ guides (please click to expand)
Below is an example snippet from one of the research guides I wrote in Confluence, located within the ‘Product benchmarking’ guide.
Example snippet from one of the research guides in Confluence
The research repository
Another part of our initiative was creating a repository for internal teams for access to key insights from research projects, organised in an easy to read and shareable way. This would help teams make consumer-centric driven decisions. It has already been adopted by one team in IKEA.
We took inspiration from UX author, Stephanie Marsh to build the catalogue in the following way.
Research catalogue plan
Outcomes
Our work has touched many teams in IKEA and moved the needle for the company towards new ways of working. By providing senior management and teams with materials and tools for inspiration, they are more self-aware of how they are approaching research activities, and are getting more value out of their projects personally and professionally.
Challenges
Due to the nature of consultancy work, we weren’t able to influence deep-rooted organisational team dynamics, which could possibly impact the dissemination and uptake of the framework in the long-term.
As it was difficult to truly embed ourselves within departments, we were naturally out of the loop on product updates and team changes that could impact our work, so we caveated this during the project.
Being constrained to using Confluence also hindered creativity. There wasn’t evidence to say it was a bad solution, but it may not have been the best.