Design principle: IKEA effect
uxplanet.org
uxplanet.org
Yes! Not sure it really works with Ikea, but it works in other contexts. See this (excellent) video from Ooshma Garg of Gobble telling the story of her startup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A21qyXsAfME
Gobble was at first a marketplace where local people could sell their ready-made food to other people who don't have time to cook but don't want to order ordinary take-out.
In order to grow her startup she asked customers what they wanted; they said they wanted instant orders and it failed.
Then she produced excellent food, and all you had to do was heat it up in the microwave. People loved the food but sales were sluggish.
The main insight was gained by watching customers use the product inside their homes; they discovered that although the food was good, people were ashamed to serve microwaved food to their loved ones.
So Gobble offered ready-to-cook elements that you can prepare in a pan, and the startup really took off then.
Maybe she would have saved some time by reading this post! ;-)
I'm aware of this, and I do actually have that kind. And what I said should hold true about getting even heat distribution regardless of that. I didn't claim it was a good (or bad) cooking technique.
It's impossible to prepare a good tasty meal with a microwave. And oven-ready food is garbage. You can't even re-heat most of your left overs properly. Ever tried to re-heat a slice of pizza in a microwave? Use a skillet or a grill, and it's as good as new.
Cooking real tasty food requires many many tools (most of which have been used for many centuries), a lot of ingredients and skill. It's an art form, essentially. And a couple decades ago, everybody knew how to do it.
I disagree, though that might be because I enjoy cold pizza.
That's bullshit. That's so bullshit that France (they might know a thing or two about good food) has discussed passing laws to require restaurants to denote which food on their menu is heated up in a microwave.
eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/business/international/in...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/french-restauran...
It was a huge scandal when it came out, because most people didn't even realize their food was being microwaved!
Yes, the microwave does a terrible job of reheating the slice of pizza that was left out overnight, but using the wrong tool for the job doesn't mean the tool is bad. A really good, properly seasoned cast-iron skillet is terrible for making coffee with, but that's no reason to throw it out.
Don't microwave pizza that's been left out overnight. Instead try food from Picards ( http://www.picard.fr/ ). They don't exist in the US but they sell exclusively microwave food, and it's just not on the same level as the sad microwave TV dinners for one that they sell at Safeway.
The microwave's just another tool in a modern kitchen, next to the sous vide machine, the Thermomix, and the Tnstant Pot. The way the microwave cooks food makes for healthier steamed vegetables, though regardless of how you steamed the veggies, slathering them with butter negates some of their health benefits.
Doesn't that proof my point? How do you think that food was cooked? With real tools, that's how. Not in a microwave. You can't cook food in a microwave.
But yes, I should clarify that I've meant 'store bought oven-ready food'. It's awful and probably the main cause for the stigma.
And yeah I agree that the microwave is just another tool in the kitchen and awesome for some things, but you can't cook most meals with it, just prepare parts of it quickly.
If you can heat food with it, you can cook food with it. Obviously, microwave cooking has different behavior than, say, baking in a conventional oven, but so does braising, pan-frying, cooking in a convection oven, or, well, any other cooking method.
the one quibble i have with the otherwise insightful article on the ikea effect is the reasoning underlying the cognitive bias. i believe it is incomplete. not only does our self-esteem rise when participating in the creation of a product (however minor), but so too does the esteem we receive from others.
the article talks about the former effect, but not the latter, though the latter effect matters as much or more to most (all?) people. the examples presented (cake, ikea furniture, even gobble meals) tend to be enjoyed by others as much as the self. other people knowing that you expended non-trivial effort in making something they can then enjoy generates social value (whereas buying an equivalent cake doesn't generate much social value).
further, the example from the article about profile creation during sign up needs a caveat: the resultant profile really needs to seem novel to other people, not just be something that essentially looks and feels live every other profile, otherwise it won't create much in the way of the ikea effect.
Really insightful. In my experience, if you give your user too much leeway to the point they actually not only have diminishing returns, but also become self-harming - that feedback loop can go awry.
What is necessary for the compounded effect is to make sure that your "IKEA" put-together item... actually looks pretty damn good... (with minimal effort by the user, that is).
It does create a sense of ownership, that sense of "I did that!"
The key is to provide enough inspiration and emotional investment that the user can get over the hump-of-learning a new tool.
Like signing up here, laughable but I get the point
It's also said to cause sellers to place a higher value on the second-hand sale price due to the bias of assembling something of their own effect, however those I've bought from rather price their items substantially lower as they're looking to see them gone for various reasons. Perhaps this bias holds more true for things like home renovations as described elsewhere in articles on the effect.
The application of this concept in tech for the examples I've read seems to be mostly in allowing customer customization which I do think helps give a feeling of creating something a little unique but personally I'd call it by some other name.
I do dislike how difficult it is to move furniture across houses though, I either need to move it as one piece or get the mover to disassemble/assemble.
Personally, I subscribe to the school of thought that says IKEA furniture should be assembled only after the instructions pamphlet has been burned. Needless to say, my better half disapproves.
An important corollary in this doctrine is that IKEA should go all-out Unbraco or Torx on their screws; wretched be those who advocate Philips heads in any application!
Aren't most main fasteners in IKEA furniture shear-loaded though? The last assembly I can remember doing was exclusively the post & socket type connectors in pre-drilled holes.
And if you're not actually torquing a fastener then Philips+ seems a bit overkill.
Would those people that consider Ikea furniture hard to assemble be more comfortable with other furniture? My guess is that they would encounter the same problems with any kind of furniture since, in my opinion, Ikea's is actually rather simple. I think it's more of a case of people not knowing how to drive complaining about how difficult to use Fords are.
IKEA furniture is pretty much designed to be assembled by anyone. And that makes me wonder whether the "IKEA" effect as described in the original link even applies. I agree with the general observation - understandably people value things they created, things that took effort. While this applies to that old coffee table you restaurated carefully, I really doubt this is true for the cheap IKEA console you're pretty much expected to assemble without problems.
But the couch was awesome and totally worth the effort. I'd do it all again :)
I am pretty handy and have a ton of nice tools and have worked with my hands building things for a living for about 6 years or so and a software developer otherwise.
I actually just had to "fix" a crappy ikea chest of drawers because the particle board popped out of the dado in the rear piece so the drawer would rub on the next drawer down. Some cheap brackets were installed as a temp fix but a real fix would be to install a better bottom board that flexes less and to glue it in place rigidly.
I've had multiple pieces of DIY furniture where there were obvious errors and you could tell instructions were translated, sometimes very poorly.
For me it's the over-embellishment of the general trend of transitioning things over from the production and retail to the consumer, charging only marginally less to beat the competition, while reaping in the profit, while marketing the whole thing as empowerment.
The build and material quality of an IKEA furniture is almost never anywhere near a well made furniture, it's only big plus is in being affordable due to economies of scale and low transport and storage costs.
Recently IKEA seems to get just outright greedy. Their material quality and thickness went from solid to barely tolerable in the last 10 years. For me they are at a borderline point of becoming disposable furniture, where it makes no sense to disassemble to move furniture even in your own house due to the one-time only quality of the connections.
Peddling in an urban or more relevantly marketing myth, doesn't even help either:
«The key marketing innovation that Dichter’s analysis spurred was not the fresh-egg cake mix, but rather the repositioning of cakes as merely one element of a larger product, an overall creation that entailed a much greater degree of participation and creativity from homemakers and emphasized appearance[!] over taste»[1]
It's a trick! You get a less tasty product, a mere product transitioned into an outlet of ego. I you're not only into marketing, but also want a good product it's important to be aware of that deceptive effect.
edit: On the flip side, IKEA actually sells some really nice pulls and handles for a price far below what I've seen anywhere else.
my biggest question that isn't answered is "how do you define contribution?". It's not a lot of work (because that's effort), and it's not how much it's worth in the end (because that's value). So... what quantity are we talking about, exactly.
edit: remove extra words
The "quantity" of contribution is measured on an emotional scale. It's how the individual feels about the impact of their effort. This is different than the value of their effort. For example, someone telling a joke, the value stays the same, x% laugh at it. But if the joke were to go viral and tens of thousands of people laugh, the contribution is increased (making more people laugh). But the value is the same. The audience had x% chance of laughing.
A different example is the original Star Trek. The value of showing fictional technologies like videoconferencing and cell phones was very low. It was part entertainment value and mostly expedited storytelling. But the contribution to human society is hugely significant, just by prompting people to action, to pursue the development of such tech, and also by helping people visualize how such tech would simplify things and make time spent more productive.
Ensuring a short-term "win" for the user (perhaps by breaking up the on-boarding into small enough parts to ensure at least 1 part of it is "completed" vs. requiring the entire thing to be done (all or nothing) could engage more users.
You might see more users complete the whole process, as well as become "active" users of product, if they are able to complete a part of it more easily...
See also http://firstround.com/review/How-Lumosity-Spiked-Active-User...
I'm no foodie, but wouldn't dehyrdated/dried eggs be far less appealing taste and/or texture-wise? If not, why don't we see them around grocery stores? It seems like it'd be great to have non- or even just less perishable eggs.
Also, I'm not sure, but I'd guess that the "egg" previously in the cake mix was not actual dried egg, but some alternative binding agent.
The book doesn't talk about this specific design principle. But the same author has a course at Lynda.com where he explains exactly that, giving the same name and using the cake mix as an example, too.
But Dan Ariely is probably the first guy that came with the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkaWYKlnli0 also with the cake example.
BTW, I am not talking about full-featured production-level web frameworks.
Not only did I love the style of the bed, but they scheduled delivery to my house.
I assumed I still had to put it together, but the delivery guys assembled the bed in my room and put the mattress on top.
IMO This is way better than spending 2 hours driving to Ikea, wandering around, buying, loading, unloading, and assembling the item.
Bear in mind that I am a bit of a Rust enthusiast myself, but I wonder if this effect is a contributor to Rust hype.
I learned it knowing well up front that it had a difficult learning curve and that was the price to pay for safe/performant code.
However, I am concerned with the description I just read. I see many classes of products where the IKEA effect could be done very easily, yet is not. Does it really apply across the board?
I wonder if anyone has done a very strict AB test against user satisfaction: for example, shipping boxes of hardware product that are fully assembled, or where the user must snap one thing together (that is easy and obvious).
Do they observe a difference in user satisfaction?
I am not certain I believe the effect is as described in this article, or as strong as described in this article, and wonder if anyone has done blinded AB tests.
Edit: The greatest example of IKEA Effect in food is the story of how all-included cake mix (vs from scratch) didn't sell, until they removed the egg powder and required the addition of your own eggs. Which apparently is an old wives' tale http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp
At least we can agree that if there is an Ikea effect, then it is present in mixing your own Yogurt.
However I am not convinced about the presence of the Ikea effect, as there are many classes of product it could apply to but, I don't see such product packaging. don't.
If you go into an electronics store (a demographic that you would think responds stronger than average to the Ikea effect) most items are absolutely fully assembled. There is nothing to snap on, pull off, a sticker to apply, a thumb screw to screw in or unscrew, nothing.
So if the Ikea effect is real (across a variety of product types), I am sure someone has done a test like to see it demonstrated by someone doing a blind AB test using two shipped versions and comparing customer satisfaction.
I'm not going to blindly believe it because someone says it's real. It would be one thing if this explained an aspect of all the products of every category that I see everywhere - but it's just not the case. Companies aren't in the business of turning down free money, so if the Ikea effect were real then you'd see it in products everywhere. More likely, the theory is just false: that an AB test shows no increased customer satisfaction from token user-assembly, or even decreased satisfaction.
This is why I asked if anyone has, in fact, done such a strictly controlled AB test.
I've had to connect the monitor stand to the monitor for many/most of my monitors, and pretty much everything at least needs to be plugged in eventually. Unless the batteries are permanently installed, those are often separate too. To say nothing about building your own Desktop...
What I point out the lack of, is assembly where it could already be assembled. So, while you do have to attach a monitor to its base, you don't have to put on a rear panel, even if it snaps on, or do anything else gratuitous. (Added by the manufacturer as an assembly step purely for the Ikea effect.)
In cases where something ships with batteries, it's usually not even included separately, but instead, already fully inserted.
Since products don't add a gratuitous user assembly step, this leads me to believe that the Ikea effect is not real. An AB test would probably clear up whether it is.
You also missed my point that IKEA effect is not necessarily a "gratuitous" assembly step, just any step(s) at all.
My guess is that, if you're going to be offering a version with granola, you're going to be designing/fabricating packaging with a separate mix-in container anyway; and since you have to have that package, it's just easier/cheaper to re-use it for other mix-ins that don't technically need to be separate than it would be to come up with another package just for them.
Surely you can agree with me that AB tests can't hurt. Anyone can say something plausible, after all! (Just see this comment thread - literally every commenter in the thread says something plausible that I could agree with, including you.) The only rigorous experiment the article mentions is about guessing the value of pre-assembled and unassembled Origami cranes.
This is obviously a problematic proxy for real-world products that manufacturers actually sell.
I remember a TV ad for a brand of yogurt with separate compartments, so you can add "a little or a lot" of the side item to the yogurt. It was a gimmick that everybody made fun of because not having all of it seemed implausible, but somebody must have done their research and figured that people like the involvement or feeling of customizing their food.
Someone downvoted all my comments in this thread. Apparently despite the fact that this is a product design guideline that in my opinion is easy (though not trivial) to test, either all the science in all the world can't test it, or we should accept the theory proposed in the article (that the Ikea effect is real, exists, and should he used in product design) without any testing.
Cargo cult, anyone? :)