IKEA
We mapped emotional and procedural friction in IKEA's online return journey — surfacing prioritized opportunities to reshape one of the most loyalty-defining moments in retail.
Returns are where loyalty either deepens — or quietly dies.
IKEA wanted to understand what was actually happening inside one of the most emotionally loaded moments of its customer experience: the online return journey. Conversion data could tell them where customers dropped off. It couldn't tell them why — or what those moments felt like.
The brief was deliberately explorative. No predetermined hypothesis. No specific feature to validate. Just an open question: where, in the online return process, are customers experiencing friction — and which of those moments matter most to fix?
"We can see the where in the data. What we can't see is the how-it-feels — and that's the part that decides whether a customer comes back."
Depth over breadth. Stories over screens.
Three months. One method as the spine: in-depth 1:1 interviews with people who had recently returned an IKEA product online.
14 interviews with customers who had completed an online return in the past 60 days. Semi-structured, story-driven, focused on the moments of doubt and decision rather than the steps themselves.
Mapped each customer's actual return journey — from the moment they decided to return through delivery confirmation. Highlighted emotional state, points of uncertainty, and the gaps between expectation and reality.
Synthesised individual journeys into shared friction patterns — separating procedural friction (broken steps) from emotional friction (uncertainty, anxiety, lack of control).
Stakeholder workshop to map opportunities against impact and effort. Output: a prioritized backlog of intervention areas the IKEA team could move into design and roadmap planning.
The biggest friction wasn't doing the return. It was not knowing what would happen next.
What IKEA walked away with.
An evidence base their product team could move on the same week — not a 60-page report.