Retail CX & E-commerce UX Case Study: IKEA SUNNERSTA

SUNNERSTA is IKEA's modular kitchenette system: a freestanding, fully configurable range designed for compact spaces and constrained budgets. Its proposition is genuinely strong: a functional kitchen that can be assembled without tools, reconfigured for any footprint, and taken apart when the tenancy ends. It serves a real and growing European market of students, young professionals, renters mid-renovation, and anyone who needs a working kitchen where a permanent one cannot go.

The product worked. The digital experience around it did not. As Creative Lead within IKEA Marketing and Communication in Älmhult, I was asked to lead a one-month service design sprint to investigate why a product with clear demand and genuine utility was generating friction, abandonment, and post-purchase failure at scale across the digital acquisition journey.

The intervention began with customer journey mapping across the full SUNNERSTA acquisition path: from social discovery through landing page to checkout. Rather than auditing the product, I audited the experience of buying it. What the mapping revealed was not a single failure but a sequence of disconnections, each one transferring cognitive work that should belong to the platform onto the customer. The first decision was therefore not to redesign a page but to redesign who carries the burden of compatibility. The answer had to be: the system, not the buyer.

With a UX researcher and an interior designer, I then built four persona profiles mapped against real European living contexts: a London student in a bedsit (small space, minimal budget), a Paris artist in a studio (small space, flexibility first), a Madrid family mid-renovation (temporary set-up, plug-and-play priority), and a Berlin user fitting out a secondary space (extra functions, small budget). Each persona had a different compatibility matrix, a different emotional state at the point of purchase, and a different definition of what a complete solution looked like. The work was to pre-compute those matrices and embed them in the experience before the customer arrived.

The output was a three-layer digital architecture. Social channels were redesigned to route directly into persona-matched landing pages rather than single-product pages, turning inspiration into a directed entry point. Each landing page presented a pre-configured, one-click bundle validated for that specific context, with every mandatory component included and every accessory relevant to that use case offered as a clear upsell. The catalogue ceased to be the interface. The bundle became the interface. Web, social, and the complete bundle checkout were designed as a single connected system, not three separate surfaces.