IKEA Effect

People value things more when they've invested their own effort in creating them.

stellae.design

Cognitive

The IKEA Effect was named and studied by Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely in a 2012 paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. They found that participants who assembled IKEA furniture valued it significantly more than identical pre-assembled furniture. The effect extends beyond physical goods — any labor that leads to a successful outcome increases perceived value. Crucially, the effect requires successful completion; if the creation fails or is destroyed, the added value disappears.

Why It Matters

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias where people place disproportionately higher value on products they partially created or assembled themselves, named after the Swedish furniture company whose customers consistently overvalue the wobbly bookshelves they built with an Allen wrench. In UX, this bias explains why users who invest effort in customizing a profile, building a playlist, or configuring a dashboard develop stronger attachment to the product and are less likely to churn. Understanding this bias also reveals a risk: teams who build a feature themselves may overvalue it relative to its actual user impact, resisting evidence-based decisions to remove or redesign it.

Real-World Examples

Spotify's curated playlists and Wrapped

Spotify encourages users to build personal playlists, follow artists, and like songs, then reflects that accumulated effort back through Wrapped year-end summaries and personalized Daily Mixes. Users who have invested hundreds of hours curating their music library feel deep ownership over their Spotify identity, making switching to a competing service feel like abandoning a creation. The investment is genuine and enjoyable rather than artificially manufactured.

Notion workspace setup

Notion lets users build their own productivity system from scratch — databases, dashboards, wikis, templates — investing significant creative effort into a workspace that reflects their personal workflow. The more a user customizes their Notion setup, the more valuable the tool becomes and the less likely they are to switch to a competitor, even if the alternative has superior features. This self-built system creates a powerful retention mechanism rooted in genuine user investment.

Counter-example

Mandatory 30-step onboarding questionnaire

A productivity app forces new users through a 30-question onboarding survey covering work style, team size, industry, goals, and preferences before granting access to the main interface. Rather than creating a sense of ownership, the exhausting process feels like a chore that most users abandon by question twelve. The team confused lengthy forced input with meaningful creative investment, mistaking the quantity of effort for the quality of engagement.

Role-Specific Guidance

Common Mistakes

• The most common mistake is confusing forced labor with meaningful investment — requiring users to fill out lengthy forms or complete tedious setup steps does not create the IKEA effect; only effort that feels creative, voluntary, and personally expressive does. Teams also fail to protect user investments by not persisting customizations reliably, leading to data loss that transforms the positive bias into resentment. Another error is ignoring the bias internally: product teams who built a feature often resist sundowning it despite poor usage metrics because their own effort inflates its perceived value.