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

This is just one of the thousands of items that you could buy on IKEA's website or at one of their locations. And you might be wondering, first of all, what it is.

It's actually just a nightlight, more specifically a wall-mounted LED nightlight. For a kid's room, but we're not gonna focus on the product itself.

More importantly, we are gonna focus on how someone would find this on IKEA's website. Would you search for turtles? Maybe you'd look under the lighting section. Maybe in kids decor, the point is that when you've got thousands of products and millions of customers, like IKEA does, there's no single obvious or correct way to categorize everything .Organizing your content or products in this case in a way that matches your user's mental models is one of the most important, and I would also say one of the most overlooked aspects, of creating a great user experience.

If you do it well, users are going to be able to find what they need, feel confident, and convert. And if you do it poorly or you don't do it at all, you're going to end up with frustrated users and a lot of missed opportunities. I'm Joe Formica and this is the UX Rundown. In each episode, we take a look at real apps, websites, and features to see what's working and what's not, and more importantly, to give you some takeaways that you can apply to your own work.

As you might've guessed, today we're looking at IKEA's website and, just like their stores, it's packed with products, lighting beds, storage, cookware, and a whole lot more.

But also just like their stores, it somehow stays pretty easy to navigate, even with thousands of SKUs and dozens of overlapping categories. IKEA makes it feel surprisingly easy to find what you're looking for.

So let's break down how they do it.

If we take a look first at the products tab, this is, I'd say the most straightforward way to organize everything just by what it is as a product.

So here you're going to see categories like storage, organization, beds and mattresses, lighting, and kitchenware. This is really functional object-based structure and a great way to organize things for people who know exactly what they're looking for.

But right next to it is the rooms tab, and this is where IKEA's understanding of their customers' mental models really starts to shine. Instead of asking, what thing do you need? This rooms tab basically asks, where are you using it?

The room category includes things like bedroom, living room, kids' room, home, office, even garage and laundry. And this might seem pretty simple, but it reflects a very different way of thinking and browsing.

If you know that you need a light, sure. Go to the lighting section. But i f you just moved and you need to outfit your whole brand new home office, you're probably thinking of it more as a space, not as just a bunch of items.

Under home office, there is even a little section called easy office upgrades. It's got things like memo boards, desk lamps, and magazine files, and it's not just organizing them by an item, it's organizing them by intent.

This is really smart contextual navigation. IKEA is not just displaying what they sell, they're displaying it in a way that matches up with how people shop.

What IKEA is doing here is called Information Architecture and they're doing it really well. Information architecture is all the organizational work and where things go, and a lot of times it's a process that happens behind the scenes, but it has a really huge impact on that end user experience.

When it's good, users are able to find what they're looking for quickly. They feel confident they can do things efficiently. But when it's bad, users are hesitant. They may be second guess clicking on something. They don't know how to get back to that thing they were just on or go forward to the thing that they want to look at, they have a hard time finding what they need.

So the question is how do you do it? Well, just like everything else in good product design, it starts with understanding your users. That means understanding their mental models, the way that they think about items, what categories they go in, the way that they navigate information, the words they use to describe a bunch of items that might be grouped together.

There are tons of other companies that do a great job of this as well.

Take Etsy, for example. Sure, you can browse by a product category, but they also organize products by occasion. So if you're shopping for a birthday, an anniversary, or even just because, they've grouped everything there for that purpose, and it's a really smart, user-centered way to surface these relevant items that you might like without making people work too hard or know exactly what they're looking for.

Netflix also does something similar. They organize their content, in this case, movies or TV shows, around context and behavior.

Take a look at this watch with the family category. It's a curated list based on what people are actually looking to do in this case. Find something good to watch together with their kids. That's a reflection that Netflix understands the real life scenarios and isn't just organizing their movies by something basic like a genre.

Gov.UK is another great example. This is one that has been suggested to me by a couple of students and a couple of my coworkers. This site, like a lot of other government sites, has a massive amount of content. There are tons of pages, forms, PDFs you can download, and endless paths that you can take to find what you're looking for, but somehow it's still surprisingly easy to navigate and find the thing you want.

They do two things really well. The first is they surface these common or high priority actions. Right at the top of the page. Second, they use plan language for their navigation. Instead of these confusing internal department names or legal terms, you get simple, clear goal-based categories like this one, register to vote.

Each of these products goes beyond just the obvious way to organize things and instead aligns their navigation and the structure of their site with the way that users actually think.

Now, let's take a look at an example that doesn't get it quite right. Here's a website for a natural history museum.

You can explore current exhibits. You can book a tour, you can buy tickets, donate, shop the gift store, all the usual stuff that you would expect to be able to do. And on the surface, everything looks pretty well organized, but I wanted to test out how well this navigation and the information architecture behind it actually works and how it actually matches up with how users think.

So I ran a tree test in Lyssna. A tree test is a simple but really effective way to check whether your site's navigation and structure makes sense to your users. It strips away all of the visuals on your site and all the design elements, and it turns your site into, basically a clickable outline of categories and subcategories, just showing the labels, and this makes it a really good way to test how effective your category names and structure really are. How easy is it for users to find what they're looking for when you're just showing them simple category names?

So for the tree test that I ran, I created this prompt. You're a second grade teacher planning a class field trip to a museum. Where would you go to find the form or the information you need to book a visit in the tree? Test participants could click through these sites, different categories and subcategories and decide where they would expect to find that information.

So how did they do?

Most people immediately went to the plan your visit section, which to me makes total sense. That's where you'd find things like buy your tickets, hours, [00:08:00] tours, and visitor services. They clicked into the tour section and chose something like book a private group tour. Seems reasonable, right?

The problem is the actual field trip booking form wasn't there at all. Now that structure isn't wrong. Field trips are often part of an education or a community partnership department at a museum, but the issue is that's not how users think about it.

So from the tree test, we also saw that the people who did eventually find the right answer, that it actually took them a really long time to get there. And in most cases, they clicked through tours, then they backed out, they tried events, they clicked around some more, and only then found departments. Meanwhile, the users who picked the wrong spot, like private group tours, got there quickly and confidently, which is actually worse. It means that most people were either confidently wrong about where to go, or they struggled to find the right path.

And as the designers, the information architects, or anyone choosing how things are organized on that site, that's something that we need to improve.

So what can we do to dig a little bit deeper? I ran an open card sort in Lyssna. Here's what we saw most users put plan a field trip into the same group as buy tickets, book a tour, and hours. Usually under a group they labeled something like Plan your visit or visitor info.

Almost no one created a separate category like departments or anything close to it.

It just didn't match how they mentally organized this kind of task. So based on this, I made a really simple change. I moved the plan a field trip item into the category plan your visit.

Then I ran the same tree test again. This time, nearly everyone went straight to the plan your visit and plan a field trip. The completion rates went way up, backtracking dropped, and most importantly, users felt confident that they were in the right place.

And that's what good information architecture does. It makes things easy to find by reflecting the way your users think rather than your internal org.

Do you have an app, website, or feature that you wanna see me break down next? If so, let me know in the comments. And if you like this one, subscribe for more real world UX breakdowns.

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Thanks for watching.