IKEA Harajuku

My RoleProduct Designer @JidoInc

TeammatesMark Stauber - PM
Christopher Hatch - Front End Eng
Dor Hananel - Front End Eng

Timeline2019 - 2020

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Impact

📱 App launched June 2020, amid COVID-19, with strong traction and positive reviews
🛒 ~20% of purchases in-store involved the app
🏆 Won the Good Design Award Japan in 2020, IF Dessign Award in 2019.
🧭 Helped define Jido’s best practices and seeded future products

Reflection

This project taught me how to balance ambition with technical limitations, and how to design for users I couldn’t see every day.

But ultimately, this app became what it set out to be: a playful, intuitive lens for exploring IKEA in a whole new way.