Service Design

Retail

2025

About The Project

IKEA is admired for its approach to design, affordability, and customer experience. Yet, the in-store checkout process often contradicted the brand’s promise. Customers commonly faced long lines, confusing Scan & Go systems, and the physical burden of scanning each product. What should be a simple last step became the most stressful, so many left with memories of friction rather than ease.

The Challenge

Research highlighted checkout as the most painful part of IKEA’s customer journey. Traditional checkouts took six minutes or longer for large baskets, especially at peak hours. Even Scan & Go, which was up to 65% faster, struggled to break 20% adoption. Customers called scanning “unpaid labor” and a skill they had to learn. Staff often had to step in for confused shoppers. The final customer impression was inefficiency and stress.

Research and Process

We led field observations and interviews across varied store formats to pinpoint pain points. Customers disliked logging into apps and scanning every item and wished they could scan everything all at once. Journey mapping consistently showed checkout as a bottleneck. Staff also confirmed the issue and noted that the task pulled them away from more valuable work.

To address these challenges, we benchmarked checkout methods, analyzed adoption rates, and co-created alternative flows with users and staff. Prototyping and journey mapping were core to the process, focusing on both technology and human experience.

Flowchart diagram of SYNKA back-end technology process for checkout at IKEA, including stages: pre-entry, entry, detect items, virtual cart, assign kiosk, payment, session locking, exit gate, kill tags, and smart validation, with respective descriptions.

SYNKA Back-End Operational Flow

The Solution

Proposed Impact

The result: SYNKA, a scanless and RFID-powered checkout experience.

  • Customers place items in their carts, then walk through RFID-enabled gates.

  • Each product is automatically detected without any manual scanning.

  • A payment kiosk is assigned, where shoppers quickly review and pay.

  • Purchases and loyalty rewards sync instantly with the IKEA Family app.

  • Special RFID cards are issued for oversized items and managed by staff to ensure coverage and prevent loss.

  • Staff focus on RFID encoding and accuracy, and customer intervention is minimized.

The entire flow is seamless. It removes queues, reduces mental load, and lets shoppers finish with a stress-free experience.

Interior of an airport or train station with RFID entry gates for access control, showing stainless steel gates, a green RFID signal light on one gate, and a digital screen on the other, with a blurred background of the station's interior.

SYNKA RFID Entry Gates

A modern, well-lit corridor with multiple payment kiosk machines on either side. The floors are smooth, and the ceilings are high with industrial design. There is a backlit display area at the far end of the corridor.

SYNKA Payment Kiosks

Key Learning

Painful touchpoints, even small ones, can overshadow the best experiences. Redesigning this critical moment protected IKEA’s brand promise and showed how human-centered technology can transform routine tasks into moments of delight. SYNKA demonstrates that operational efficiency and emotional impact can work together.

Modern metal exit gate with green indicator lights, located in an indoor environment with a yellow arrow pointing to the left and a sign indicating 'Exit Gates'. An illustration in the bottom right corner shows a person pushing a cart through two black gates.

SYNKA Exit Gates

Based on benchmarks and projected adoption, SYNKA reduces the checkout journey from 6 minutes to just 2 minutes. This covers the entire process from entering the checkout area to exiting after payment. Compared to traditional methods, this is a reduction of more than 65% in checkout time and provides a seamless, stress-free experience for customers and staff. For personas like Luisa, a busy professional, SYNKA transforms the end of her IKEA trip into a quick and positive finale that matches the brand’s expectations.