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Back to work
Case study
Redesigning the organisation of the organisation department
Most UX designers map user flows on a screen. I mapped one across the floor of an IKEA store — where the users were real shoppers, the interface was steel shelving and signage, and my analytics were the paths people walked.
A nine-month, end-to-end redesign of IKEA's Storage & Organisation department — driven by sales data, shopper behaviour, and a hard spatial constraint.
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I redesigned the organisation of the organisation department
I owned the end-to-end redesign of IKEA's Storage & Organisation department — the home of boxes, bins, and modular systems like SAMLA, DRÖNA, KUGGIS, and SKÅDIS.
Unlike a showroom shopper browsing for inspiration, the people here arrived with a problem to solve: a messy closet, an overflowing garage, a playroom in chaos. They were task-driven and practical — most knew what they came for and wanted to find the right container fast. But the existing layout made that harder than it should have been, and it had run out of room to grow.
I partnered with the department's sales team and manager — the people closest to the customer — to understand how shoppers navigated, where they hesitated, and what the business needed to sell. I translated their frontline knowledge and sales data into a redesign of the department's layout, product grouping, wayfinding, and flow.
Out of room — without losing the trail
The department was at capacity. Sales needed room to introduce more product and grow revenue — but the existing layout and grouping couldn't fit more without sacrificing the flow that made products sell.
My task wasn't to make the space prettier. It was to reorganise the department to create more selling space, while protecting the "trail" — the primary path shoppers follow, where high-priority products like SAMLA needed to stay to keep selling.
A product on the main path sells better — it's already in the shopper's flow. SAMLA, IKEA's best-seller, already lived there. The challenge was to fit more product without knocking the hero off the path that made it work. In digital terms: prioritising your highest-value action inside the primary flow rather than burying it.
Start
Entrance — DRÖNA
Laundry & baskets
turn left
Turn right
SAMLA comes into view
The break · hero
SAMLA — the break, dead ahead
hero product · can't miss it, can't unsee it
13 → 27 selling surfaces (~2× capacity)
Turn right · into the main run
SKUBB · STUK (right) — hangers & shoes (left)
Continue straight · KUGGIS (right)
End
Shelves (left) · SKÅDIS (right)
end of department → exit
I went to the people who saw these customers every day
Across working sessions with the sales team and my department manager, I gathered the most-asked customer questions, the typical journey and its "stop and shop" points, sales performance by product, and the business's priorities for what needed to move.
Four insights, four framed problems
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Insight → decision → reason
Each decision ties back to a problem and a reason. That chain is the spine of the work.
Working within the system
I started from IKEA's global layout standards — internal guides, recommended planograms, reference layouts that encode years of retail learning. That was my design system. On top of it I layered what only the local team knew: which specific products over- and under-performed, and where. A slow-selling bin was deliberately kept out of prime positions — frontline data overriding a generic rule.
Outcome — #1 of five
The redesign turned a department already at capacity into the country's top performer for its category.
Sales-target achievement · Storage & Organisation
94%92%90%88%
Rishon LeZion (redesigned)
National average
Measured from January to May 2026, the department reached 92.53% of its sales target — the highest of all five IKEA branches in Israel, above the national average of 90.68% for the Storage & Organisation category.
Sales representatives reported shoppers buying more and products needing restocking more frequently — a frontline signal the numbers confirmed.
The redesign turned a department already at capacity into the country's top performer for its category.
From the floor manager
Tamir was the designer responsible for the storage department, and led its redesign from planning through to build. The result was a department with high commercial visibility — organised, inspiring, and shaped around the customer experience.
Sara Nassimian Elgazar
Commercial Floor Manager · IKEA Israel, Rishon LeZion
translated from Hebrew
Read the full letter (PDF, Hebrew) ↓
I trusted an inherited layout instead of verifying it myself
The department sits inside fixed boundaries — the outer walls never move — so I took the existing measurements from the previous designer's file and assumed they were accurate. They looked right. In a few places, they weren't.
I designed a new wall to hold 14 sections, and on paper it fit perfectly. But when the contractor arrived to build it, the real space only allowed 13. A small inaccuracy in an inherited file became a physical problem at the most expensive possible moment — on site, during the build.
The lesson: never trust inherited specs or legacy assumptions without validating them against ground truth yourself. Now I verify the source of truth before I design on top of it — whether that's a wall measurement or a handoff file. Accuracy at the foundation is cheaper than a fix at the end.
Want to see more?
There's more where this came from — and I'm always up for a conversation.
Designed in AutoCAD and SketchUp, within IKEA's global layout system, and grounded in sales data and frontline insight from the team. The thinking — prioritising a hero action in the primary flow, separating browsing from action, building decision support at the point of choice, working within a design system and adapting it with data — is the same thinking I bring to digital product design.