The IKEA Effect: A UX Researcher's Guide to Building Stakeholder Buy-In
From furniture assembly to stakeholder engagement
Summary: When stakeholders help create research insights instead of just receiving them, they show higher implementation rates. The IKEA effect (our tendency to overvalue things we help build) offers us a powerful tool for transforming passive stakeholders into active champions of user-centred design.
The psychology behind our attachment to DIY
Picture this: You spend three hours assembling an IKEA bookshelf, wrestling with complex instructions and mysteriously leftover screws. When you're done, that wobbly piece of furniture feels like a masterpiece. You'd probably pay more for your amateur handiwork than for an identical pre-assembled version from the store.
This isn't just pride talking. It's a fundamental quirk of human psychology, named the IKEA effect, that was uncovered in 2012 by Norton, Mochon, and Ariely.
The IKEA effect was named after the famous Swedish furniture store and describes our systematic tendency to place disproportionately high value on products we've partially created ourselves, compared to identical items created by others. It's not about the quality of the final product, it's about the psychological investment we make in the creation process.
The effect was identified in three experiments:
The IKEA box experiment is the most famous one. Participants were divided into two groups: builders and non-builders. The builders received IKEA storage boxes with instructions and assembled them from scratch. The non-builders received identical, pre-assembled boxes. Once the boxes were built/acquired, both groups were asked how much they'd be willing to pay for them. Researchers found that builders valued their self-assembled boxes at $0.78 on average, while non-builders valued the identical pre-built boxes at only $0.48. That's a 63% premium for labor that added zero objective value to the product.
The origami study had participants folding origami cranes and frogs following standard instructions. Some succeeded in creating recognisable (if amateur) figures, while others produced what could generously be called "abstract art." The researchers then asked both the creators and neutral observers to bid on these paper creations. Builders valued their amateur origami at $0.23 on average, while neutral observers valued the same creations at only $0.05. Most remarkably, the builders valued their own work nearly as much as expert-made origami ($0.27), despite the obvious quality difference.
The Lego experiment introduced a twist: destruction. Some participants built Lego sets and kept them intact, while others watched their creations get disassembled immediately after completion. Only the participants whose Legos remained intact showed the IKEA effect. Destruction eliminated the increased valuation entirely. This third experiment revealed a critical boundary condition: the IKEA effect requires not just effort, but successful completion and preservation of the created object.
What’s behind the Ikea effect?
The IKEA effect operates through three psychological mechanisms that researchers have identified and validated through decades of behavioural research.
Effort justification forms the cognitive foundation of the effect. Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) explains how humans resolve psychological discomfort when our effort seems disproportionate to the outcome. When we invest time and energy creating something, we experience internal pressure to justify that investment. The easiest way? Convince ourselves the result is more valuable than it objectively appears. It’s worth noting that this isn't conscious deception. It's an automatic mental adjustment that happens below our awareness. Our brains rewrite our perception of value to align with our investment, protecting us from the uncomfortable feeling that we've wasted our time.
Competence satisfaction is another function at play here and it taps into deeper human needs. Albert Bandura's self-efficacy research (Bandura, 1977) demonstrates that humans have a fundamental drive to feel capable and effective in their environment. Successfully completing creation tasks satisfies this need for competence, generating positive emotions that become psychologically linked to the created object. When you successfully assemble that IKEA bookshelf, you're not just building furniture. You're proving to yourself that you can follow instructions, solve problems, and create something functional with your own hands. That feeling of competence gets embedded in your relationship with the object.
Finally, we have psychological ownership. The creation process incorporates objects into our extended sense of self. Psychologists call this "self-extension"—the way we use objects to signal our identity and capabilities, both to ourselves and others. Your self-assembled bookshelf becomes more than furniture. It becomes evidence of your competence, a physical manifestation of time and effort you invested, and a small piece of your identity as someone who "builds things." This psychological ownership creates emotional attachment that transcends any objective product characteristics.
From furniture assembly to stakeholder engagement
You might wonder why I’m telling you all this… Here's where it gets interesting for UX professionals: the IKEA effect isn't limited to physical products. It applies to any collaborative creation process, including research insights, strategic recommendations, and design decisions.
Think about your typical research presentation. You've spent weeks interviewing users, analysing data, and synthesising insights. You create informative graphs, craft compelling narratives, and present your findings to stakeholders. They nod politely, ask a few questions, and promise to "socialise the insights with their teams."
Then nothing happens. The research sits in a shared drive (or repository), recommendations go unimplemented, and six months later someone asks if you can "re-validate" the findings because priorities have shifted. Is there anything we can do to prevent this?
Transforming your research practice
That’s where the Ikea effect can work to our advantage1. The solution isn't to turn stakeholders into researchers. It's to create meaningful opportunities for them to participate in the insight generation process, triggering the psychological mechanisms that drive ownership and commitment. Here are some ways I do this:
Research planning becomes collaborative strategy: Instead of presenting pre-defined research questions, work with the stakeholders to help identify what they need to learn and why. You can do this asynchronously or in a workshop. A technique I use is assumption mapping, where teams collectively identify and prioritise their biggest unknowns about users. Have stakeholders participate in methodology selection. Present a few potential research approaches and guide them through the trade-offs. When they choose the direction, they're invested in the outcome. This isn't about letting non-researchers make methodological decisions — it's about creating shared ownership of the strategic choices that shape your research.
Data collection transforms into shared discovery: Traditional user research positions stakeholders as passive recipients of findings. Collaborative approaches make them active participants in the discovery process. A way to do this is by giving stakeholders the opportunity to be observers during user interviews and usability tests. You can give them specific tasks (e.g. note-taker) or if they’re too busy just invite them to some of the sessions. The point isn’t for them to attend every single one but to get the chance to participate in a some. When they witness user struggles firsthand, they don't just understand the problems intellectually — they feel the pain viscerally, in the way UX researchers do.
Synthesis becomes co-creation: This is where the IKEA effect reaches its full potential. Replace traditional research readouts with collaborative analysis sessions. You can use affinity mapping workshops where stakeholders help organise and categorise research findings. Provide Post-it notes with individual user quotes, observations, and data points. Guide stakeholders through the process of grouping related insights and identifying overarching themes. The patterns they discover feel more compelling than the patterns you present and they passively consume.
Frequent communication is key: Even when dealing with busy stakeholders who can’t find the time to be so actively involved in the research process, there are still opportunities to share the process with them and make them feel ownership. An approach I often use involves creating slack channels and frequently sharing raw materials from the studies (e.g. user quotes, short videos) as well as weekly summaries. This gives stakeholders the chance to identify some patterns and feel part of the research process.
Language matters: The language we use when presenting the insights can also help. For example, make sure to include stakeholder names and specific contributions in research reports and presentations. Make them feel part of the “research team”. This recognition reinforces psychological ownership and encourages future participation.
Limitations
Understanding limitations of the effect can prevent misapplication and builds credibility with skeptical stakeholders who might question collaborative approaches.
First of all, as seen in the original research the effect requires successful completion. Failed attempts or incomplete experiences eliminate increased valuation. It is important to provide adequate support, clear processes, and realistic scope to ensure positive outcomes.
A potential risk of this approach is stakeholders overestimating the importance of specific study findings. The IKEA effect can lead stakeholders to overvalue internally generated insights while dismissing external expertise or contradictory evidence. For example, if they come across the same usability issue in two sessions they attend, they might end up overestimating the impact it has on user experience, creating blind spots. We can counteract this by combining collaborative approaches with independent validation and ensuring the researchers are the ultimate decision makers when it comes to methodology.
Conclusion
The IKEA effect offers a simple but powerful lesson: people value what they help create. By involving stakeholders in the research process, we move them from passive recipients to active participants. This isn’t about giving up rigour. It’s about designing moments of collaboration that build ownership, increase engagement, and make our insights more likely to drive real change.
Is this an approach you use in your practice? Let me know in the comments!
the effect also applies to user psychology; they tend to place higher value and keep using products and features they help build. We’ll cover this in a future article.
The IKEA effect beautifully illustrates why Agile teams thrive when they’re involved in shaping the work they do. In Agile, team members don’t just build—they co-create. From collaborating with the Product Manager to prioritize the backlog, to jointly designing solutions, agreeing on the implementation approach, and estimating effort— shared ownership taps into the same psychology: we naturally value what we help build.