I guess that’s what I get for living more than 150 miles from the closest IKEA in the States.

The major problem is that the chart doesn’t make sense for defining open/closed hours, and so doesn’t properly tell us where the “date line” on the graphic lies.

Although it is purportedly aimed at planning when you come in, it seems better suited for giving current status. By which I mean, you get there at 3:00 in the afternoon, and you can see that you’re right in the middle of the “red” area. You might also see that that red area lasts a few more hours, and you’ll plan on coming back later. It utterly fails, however, at giving you the most important (to you) planning information, which is: these are the hours you should come to our store if you don’t want to be caught in a mob.

Also, I find the phrase “utmost shopping experience” personally offensive. Why is nobody complaining about that?

Yes – a thick black line at 9 would help. Maybe even with “am” above it and “pm” below.

> NOT what hours they are open but rather when it’s really busy

It’s both, but it does a really bad job of showing the hours on Saturday.

I’d have done a 24-hr clockface and confused everybody other than myself even more, I suspect.

Look at your watch: Oh it’s 10:30
Look at the chart at 10:30

They still make you go huh? though. Is it that we are used to having these things overlap between am and pm?

I agree- an ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ tag next to the number would probably help.

The big failure is this kind of signage is supposed to take virtually zero time to read.

The designer hung on to their clock metaphor into the land of ridiculousness.

Clock Faces are habitually read in one kind of way, trying to overlay it with another order of info is only going to get you in trouble.

If they used a vertical segmented list like a day planner, we would get times of operation and people volume in one place and we wouldn’t have to reverse engineer the clock/pie chart mashup.

Though saying that I want to make an even more obtuse clock/pie chart mashup :)

Also, comparing Sunday to weekdays: the Sunday hours have Ikea closed for 14 hours, Saturday is 13 hours. This is 7.69% longer, however visually, it would appear that the store is closed twice as long. To the people saying “its not that hard” please read the comments re: usability across the population.

Whether you can understand it or not (i think we all can derive the necessary info…) the fact is that it is internally inconsistent due to lacking a clear scale and thus is a flawed and IMO poor graphic.

And you’re talking about it.

AND you’re discussing it on one of the most widely-read web forums.

Good or bad, its design is engaging. With that, I’d say it’s pretty effective.

-Andy

1) appending “am” or “pm” onto the numbers
2) putting a clockwise arrow near the 9, to show that the clock starts there.

Still, that’s less than elegant, and not really acceptable. Colored bar charts suggesting a timeline would be vastly preferable.

Is it an elegantly designed graph that quickly conveys the information you need? hmmm…yes and no.

The longer you look at it, the more you think about it, the worse it gets.

If all you want to know are the good (or bad) hours to shop at Ikea, then it works. Find the green (or red) slice, and see what time it starts and ends. This is what the designer had in mind.

If you’re trying to figure out the store hours from the graph, which (hopefully) wasn’t a design goal, then it fails. You need to think about it, compare graphs and assume the 9-9 for Saturday (what if they are actually open 9am-10pm?).

Even if the start/end times could be confusing, the message is clear: Ikea on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon is just a bad idea. Go during the week instead.

Wouldn’t a sign like this be a faster read?

For a more humane experience, come in during our least busy hours:

Monday – Friday 10a – 7p
Saturday 9a – 1p
Sunday 10a – noon

Is this the most controversial article of late, or what?

However, that’s also the problem with it… it’s both a pie chart and a clock and it takes the viewer a few moment of the data flipping back & forth in the mind like one of those faces/vases graphics.

I agree that this could all be said much more simply: Ikea is most crowded on weekend afternoons, and least crowded in the daytime on weekdays.

not so much on this one.

i’m guessing that matt figured it out. i’m guessing that most boingboing readers figured it out. perhaps it even challenged you to do some critical thinking in combining a pie graph with a clock.

LOL, but Tommy that’s the entire point of the graphic–to display the times when the store isn’t crowded!

Again, the argument that 1/2 the readers don’t find it confusing is actually pretty damning. That means 1/2 of the users do find it confusing–surely we can have higher usability standards than that!

I see your point about hyper-criticalness… but for me, and I suspect many BB readers, it’s a productive exercise and not just nit-picking. Many of us are involved with presenting data to users/readers/or-what-have you. For those of us in this situation, it doesn’t matter so much that someone can figure out the info–it’s a question of whether this is an interesting, clear, & efficient way to communicate the data

But, still, it made immediate sense to me. I know it shouldn’t, but it did.