Information architecture: IKEA case study

Welcome to the UX Rundown. In this series, we share quick, actionable UX breakdowns of real apps and websites – spot what works, what doesn’t, and learn how to apply it to your own designs.

Discover how IKEA's website makes finding products effortless – even with thousands of SKUs. This UX case study explores information architecture through real examples, showing you how to organize content that matches the way your users actually think.

What you'll learn in this UX tutorial:

• How IKEA uses multiple navigation structures (products vs rooms) to serve different user mental models.

• Why good information architecture is invisible – but bad IA creates immediate friction.

• How to test your site structure using tree testing and card sorting.

• Real examples from Etsy, Netflix, and Gov.UK that demonstrate user-centered organization.

• Step-by-step process for identifying and fixing navigation problems

We'll examine how organizing content by user intent (not just product categories) creates intuitive experiences, walk through a museum website that struggled with IA, and show how simple research methods revealed the problem and validated a better solution.

Perfect for UX designers, product managers, information architects, and anyone building websites or apps with complex navigation.

Key takeaway: Great information architecture reflects how users think about your content – not how your company is organized internally.

Chapters:

• 0:00 - Introduction: The challenge of organizing thousands of products

• 1:19 - IKEA's dual navigation: Products vs rooms

• 3:17 - What is information architecture and why it matters

• 4:17 - Real-world examples: Etsy, Netflix, and Gov.UK

• 6:19 - Case study: A museum website with confusing navigation

• 6:48 - Using tree testing to identify the problem

• 9:06 - Running a card sort to understand user mental models

• 10:03 - Key principles for creating intuitive information architecture

Transcript