Visualization of real-time data from IKEA’s self-service kiosks

Sammanfattning

IKEA, a company well known around the world for their furniture, is also keen on using digital solutions to improve the customer experience. One of these solutions is the self-serving kiosk, a 27" touchscreen, that helps the customers find and buy products. As many other companies of similar size, IKEA wants to use the data from their digital solutions, as a base for some of their decision making. When this thesis was started, the IT team that was responsible for the self-serving kiosks did gather data from the self-serving kiosks, however they did not have any tool that would allow them to visualize it in real-time. As such, the purpose of this thesis was to create a web application that would visualize the data gathered from the self-serving kiosks in real-time. The process of creating the application consisted of the thesis workers gaining an understanding of the tools that they would use to develop the application. It also consisted of them learning about visualization UX theory, and picking the visu- alization methods that would best fit the data from the self-serving kiosks. Lastly the thesis workers would actually create the application, with the knowledge that they had built up. Throughout the making of the thesis, the thesis workers inter- viewed and showed the people at IKEA prototypes in order to understand what visualization methods that they would like, as well as what functionality that they desired in the web application. The application was also usability tested at the end of the development process. The end result of the thesis was a web application that could visualize the activ- ity of all the kiosks in a store. The application allowed the user see things such as: which kiosks were used at the same time, when the kiosks were used and for how long, what activities that a customer performed on a kiosk, for how long the kiosks were idle in comparison to how much they are active, as well as how each kiosk is used compared to the others.