Introducing Agu
Your personal IKEA customer support
A conversational user interface created for IKEA. Agu is designed to live inside the existing IKEA mobile app, functioning as personal customer support for the post-shopping experience.
My Roles:
Product Designer
Motion Designer
Visual Designer
Team:
Hayoon Choi
Chris Han
Neely Lee
Timeline:
7 weeks,
Spring 2022
Solution
A conversation user interface
Meet “Agu,” a conversation user interface (CUI) that derives its name from the village in which IKEA’s founder grew up, the “A” in the acronym “IKEA.” Agu is here to address more complex customer needs such as requesting for a missing part. It is an additional option to calling live agents.
CUI states
When Agu interacts with the user, its different states give the user visual feedback on top of audio response, making transparent what it's "thinking."
As an additional feature of the IKEA app, at the sound of its name, Agu will spring into view, bringing forth both a voice-based and graphic user interface.
Users can choose to use voice only or combine touch screen in interacting with Agu.
While researching user pain points around IKEA customer support, we interviewed existing customers and synthesized their responses into two distinct personas. These two personas kickstarted our brainstorm around a flexible support system that can address a diverse range of needs instead of focusing on a specific population.
User Journey
Streamlining the experience
Below is a user journey map focused on an end-to-end flow of user interaction with Agu, requesting for a missing part during furniture assembly. Along the way, Agu guides the user with questions and confirmations, giving them options without overwhelming with too much information at once.
Building on a beloved brand
Since IKEA has a very established and well-loved brand, we built on top of its existing visual language. For our campaign introducing Agu, we want to create a new and exciting variant of the brand, adding pops of bright colors as well as creating illustrations to add to the delight factor.
Searching for a metaphor
When creating the form of Agu, we brainstormed various ways of representing IKEA through visual metaphors, exploring a range of options from simple to complex, abstract to literal.
Designing a campaign
To tie everything together and explain our concept, we created a campaign video that walks through one user flow. To build an exciting and delightful narrative, we used an illustrated style instead of heavily relying on photography, which the main IKEA brand uses.
