I was surprised to see Ikea’s most recent site, and not in a good way. Except for the first page, the top half of each index page is a huge movie - which is why it takes so long to load - that tries to cross-sell me. All Marketers seek this holy grail, and the result, should you wait for it, is a clickable image which suggests interaction. The problem is that someone just could not resist putting a billboard along the journey, and it all takes too long to load. This is a great idea on someone’s desktop that gets killed in the real world - it could all work well if it loaded in a third the time.



So the designers however have decided to flash a message at me before allowing the interaction. Perhaps this is some theme that informed the selection of objects for the photograph. Great, but unfortunately I don’t care. If the photo is good, it will describe the idea. If not, no text will cure it. I would guess that most users perceive it as a big ad and click away quickly; before they realize that the surface becomes a clickable portal to more information. Because of this lack of judgement on Ikea’s part, they damage their brand.



Let’s assume a typical scenario. A customer appears looking for the cheapest Billy bookshelf which will hold the books they still keep in boxes from the last time they moved [just a completely random hypothesis].

The brand building approach is to allow the user to find things on the site while offering related options in one area and even very lateral things in another. As well, these sites tend to contain extraordinary numbers of goods so some evidence as to what you looked at recently would be handy. And even better if it you could choose to expand it.

The less appealing approach is to stand in your users way like a barker in a hot dog suit. I have seen more annoying transpositions from other media - most notably when print magazines kludge together a page turning metaphor to shovel the magazine online. The issue is the lack of understanding as to why the user came there.



What motivates the impulse to force these messages down your throat? Certainly any Marketing Exec is going to look at their page views versus buys and want a higher response. The gap between lookers & buyers is vast on the internet, but people viewing this from the POV of a spreadsheet rarely realize the complexity of the psychology involved. Moving someone who is dreaming of stuff they could buy to buying takes either a delicate push or an extremely compelling offer. Both strategies have utility in different contexts. But they share the reality of user impatience. We just don’t want to wait. When I see a progress bar, the words that appear in my head are “Skip Intro”.

As a brand do you want to help your customers or get in their way? People having positive feelings about your Brand is like catching lightning in a bottle; there are many factors that contribute to it and if only a couple are off you can wreck the feeling. In a ‘delicate push’ context, standing in my way waving a flag may not help, or worse, may help your numbers temporarily while eroding brand confidence.

A better idea would be to invite your users to participate in your experience, which allowing them to choose does on the most elementary level. There is an emerging group of tools to do this in a much more sophisticated way; finding the right juncture between risk exposure, interaction & the amount of investment from the user is the challenging balance.
Not to get too geeky, but the best part of the site is actually the  HTML & Javascript coding which are beautifully commented and well structured. It is unfortunate that the visible site does not show the same forethought and consideration.