> <i>People had the need to be emotionally invested and get rewards from the process of making the cake not just the end result.</i><p>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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A21qyXsAfME" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A21qyXsAfME</a><p>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.<p>In order to grow her startup she asked customers what they wanted; they said they wanted instant orders and it failed.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So Gobble offered ready-to-cook elements that you can prepare in a pan, and the startup really took off then.<p>Maybe she would have saved some time by reading this post! ;-)
I vaguely remember reading about this effect before but honestly, I've never met someone who expressed this feeling about Ikea products. Whether it's my own set-ups, friends, or the dozens of people I've bought and sold Ikea furniture from/to. If anything some have expressed frustration at the difficultly they had in putting together some builds.<p>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.<p>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.
With IKEA, at least I, don't value my efforts, but the savings compared to having to pay someone for a perceived(!) zero-skill job, while still getting the same product.<p>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 <i>empowerment</i>.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Peddling in an urban or more relevantly marketing myth, doesn't even help either:<p>«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]<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp</a>
Maybe I'm a snob but I begrudgingly buy IKEA products, view assembling them as tedium in which I gain 0 improvement in a translatable skill and despise the sight of their borderline cardboard junkiness until the day I can replace them and send them off with some stranger.<p>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.
that plot of "the sweet spot of getting to the ikea effect" is a mediocre visualazation... it implicitly puts "contribution" and "value" on the same axis with no way to decouple them.<p>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.<p><i>edit: remove extra words</i>
> The solution was to get out the egg of the dry mixture and allow people to add it themselves.<p>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.
"People tend to place high value on products they partially have created. Hence, the name IKEA effect." - Frankly, I've never met anyone who thought that IKEA products are of particularly high value. They're great because they offer modern-looking furniture that even students can afford, but at least where I live, the middle class stops considering IKEA once they leave student status behind, unless it's for book shelves or stuff like that in the study or the basement, i.e, not for rooms you actually live in.
> The article is inspired by the book “Universal Design principles” by William Lidwell.<p>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.<p>But Dan Ariely is probably the first guy that came with the idea: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkaWYKlnli0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkaWYKlnli0</a> also with the cake example.
That's why there are tens of thousands of toy web frameworks out there. It's quite a simple task (basically assembling routing/template engine/ORM, etc), but programmers just cannot resist the sense of accomplishment from such a project. Because the end product looks so valuable, people just ignore how little value was added in that process.<p>BTW, I am not talking about full-featured production-level web frameworks.
Very interesting principle. Now when I think about this games utilize this design heavily. For example in Final Fantasy X you can select which statistics to improve or skills to learn on a Sphere Grid. The Grid is designed so that its effect is mostly predictable and similar to previous games (in terms of skills learned and stats increased) but the player has a feeling like he was in control here.
I just recently bought my first piece of nicer furniture, not Ikea, but a bed from Crate and Barrel.<p>Not only did I love the style of the bed, but they scheduled delivery to my house.<p>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.<p>IMO This is way better than spending 2 hours driving to Ikea, wandering around, buying, loading, unloading, and assembling the item.
In my experience, if someone has a vague interest in something, then any new information (in an easy and digestible fashion) goes a long way in making them care a lot more about what you do.
This is very interesting and new to me. Not mentioned in the article, but it also explains these yogurts you mix a dry side into ( <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=yogurt+with+separate+topping" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=yogurt+with+separate+topping</a> )<p>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?<p>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).<p>Do they observe a difference in user satisfaction?<p>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.