IKEA Harajuku

My RoleFounding Product Designer @JidoInc

What is this?IKEA Harajuku is an AR powered shopping companion for your favorite furniture store.

Timeline2019 - 2020

Impacts
📱 App launched June 2020, amid COVID-19, with strong traction and positive reviews 4.48 out of 5 on App Store.
📱 In average 457 sessions per week with 216 unique users.
🛒 Hand-off ¥53,717 per cart to ikea.com
🏆 Won the Good Design Award Japan in 2020, IF Dessign Award in 2019.
🧭 Helped define Jido’s best practices and seeded future products

About Jido Inc

I joined Jido Inc. expecting a unique adventure—and it delivered. Like any startup, it had its highs and lows, but it was a joyful ride of building products people love and learning from every step along the way.

This case study will focus on the IKEA Harajuku Project.

Overview

IKEA Harajuku is more than just a flagship store—it’s a design-forward, compact retail space in the heart of Tokyo where shopping meets exploration. As the founding designer at Jido Inc., I was tasked with creating an AR-powered mobile app that transforms how customers engage with products, making furniture discovery more intuitive, immersive, and playful.

The goal: turn a smartphone into a smart camera that instantly recognizes items, offers contextual info, and previews unseen variations—all in real time.

My Role

As the founding designer, I was closely involved in every stage of the IKEA Harajuku app’s development. My responsibilities included:

Defining product scope and contributing to roadmap planning in collaboration with cross-functional teams
Leading remote user research with a focus on the Japanese market to inform key design decisions
Designing, prototyping, and testing the app’s information architecture, interaction flows, and user interfaces
Creating and maintaining a design system aligned with IKEA’s global design language and brand standards

This end-to-end involvement ensured a cohesive user experience tailored to both local users and global brand expectations.

Design for both IKEA and customers

Rather than being driven by technology alone, we grounded the UX and UI in human sensibilities—designed to fit the unique vibe of Harajuku, Japan. The app was shaped by a commitment to accessibility, cultural context, and real-world behavior.
With limited time for prototyping or iteration, our approach was almost philosophical, guided by intuition and simplicity. At Jido Inc., we view this mindset as essential—especially as interfaces become increasingly contextual, fluid, and seamlessly woven into our everyday physical environments.

Reimagining the future of in-store shopping interfaces

Designing IKEA Harajuku wasn’t about tweaking an existing shopping app—it was about inventing a new way for Japanese customers to interact with IKEA products, from the ground up. It took bold exploration, rapid prototyping, and countless iterations to bring that vision to life.

Hover over the image (or tap on mobile) to reveal design notes

Technical limitation

Back in 2019, the technology wasn’t quite on our side—machine learning lacked precision, mobile AR struggled in real-world lighting, and there were no established patterns for building intuitive, one-handed, camera-based interfaces.

We tackled these challenges head-on through relentless prototyping, exploring how to make a camera experience feel seamless—even magical.

Hover over the image (or tap on mobile) to reveal design notes

The result was a clean, powerful annotation-style UI that served as the user’s entry point. It stayed out of the way while viewing products, maintained strong contrast across any background, and offered four suggestions to ensure accuracy—even when AI confidence wasn't perfect.

We ended up with this simple yet intuitive interface. IKEA Harajuku is built around the phone camera. Powered by Jido’s state-of-the-art machine learning, the app can recognize and label over 8,500 IKEA products in-store—delivering a seamless AR experience that bridges the physical and digital.

We designed a bottom sheet to present all 2D content, creating a more natural and comfortable browsing experience—so users aren’t stuck in the typical “point-and-shoot” AR stance.

Within the bottom sheet, users can shop, view AR models, explore similar product recommendations, and most importantly, find the product’s in-store location.

Design Collab

Back in 2019–2020, as Figma was quickly becoming the standard for design collaboration, we saw the perfect opportunity to align our workflow with IKEA’s global teams. We built a shared component library from the IKEA Harajuku project—designed for consistency, scalability, and reuse—and pitched it as a foundation for future products. It wasn’t just a one-off app; it was a seed for a sustainable design system.

Reflection

IKEA Harajuku challenged us to design not just for utility, but for delight, culture, and context. It wasn’t about digitizing a catalog or optimizing a flow—it was about creating a new language between people and products, one that felt intuitive in the hand, expressive through the camera, and uniquely at home in Harajuku.

With emerging tech that was often unpredictable, and without existing design patterns to lean on, we had to prototype like explorers—letting natural behavior and local sensibilities guide our decisions. The final product wasn’t perfect, but it was alive: a fluid experience that invited discovery, respected attention, and reimagined what in-store interaction could be.

In the end, this project reminded me that designing with emerging technology isn’t about chasing novelty—it’s about finding humanity in the unknown, and shaping tools that feel not just smart, but personal.