It has happened to all of us at some point: we see a piece of furniture, a lamp or any small home accessory and for a few seconds we imagine the final result, already placed, as if it had appeared there by magic. Then comes the second image, much less pleasant: the box on the floor, the pieces spread out and that doubt as to whether we have the patience, the time and the necessary tools to finish it without regretting it. Buy something to ride It’s not just choosing a product; It is also accepting a small future task.
That’s where it comes in IKEA Complexity Indexa website as simple as it is effective that turns that previous suspicion into a sortable table. It is not an official IKEA tool, and the site itself makes it clear by presenting itself as a fan project, but its starting point is very recognizable: gathering more than 21,000 products from the store and classifying them according to the effort that assembly may require.
To accomplish its mission, it calculates a score from steps and parts, and adds data such as manuals, estimated time, and ease ratings. This allows us to look at the catalog from a very different question than the usual one: not how much it costs, but how much it will require of us.
The price tells how much work remains ahead
The page does not try to impress with design. As we can see in the screenshot, we have a table, a search engine, a category selector and a very specific filter to only be left with products that have a single PDF of instructions. From there, we can sort by price, steps, part types, total parts, manual pages, complexity or estimated time. There is an important precision: the prices are in dollars and the items link to the American IKEA store, so not everything has to be available in Spain or other European markets.
IKEA Complexity Index has a simple design
When we start sorting by complexity, the table leaves some quite curious scenes. At the bottom, products with a score of 1 appear, such as FÄLLSVIK mini glass door for BESTÅ furniture wave NYMÅNE work lamp with wireless chargingtwo articles that the index dispatches as minimal assemblies. At the other end, when consulting the page, a PAX corner wardrobe with 175,348 points and an estimate of 624 minutes. It is a large combination, with several associated manuals and a clear warning on the IKEA sheet: it takes two people to assemble it.
The FÄLLSVIK mini glass door has a score of 1 on the IKEA Complexity Index
The index also serves to dismantle a fairly convenient intuition: thinking that the most expensive will necessarily be the most difficult. By consulting the table, the JÄTTEBO Sectional six-seater It appears with a price of $5,345, but with a score of 684, very far from the PAX that we just saw. And something similar happens downwards: STRÅLA decorative screen and the UTSÅDD hook shaped like a cat cost $2.99, but they don’t demand the same by this metric. The first scores 40 points; the second, 6.
The PAX corner wardrobe reaches 175,348 points in the IKEA Complexity Index
The usefulness of this classification is better understood when we look at a job published in 2022. The Journal of Business Research analyzed reviews of IKEA products and found that ease of assembly weighed on satisfaction and subsequent recommendation. That is to say, it is not enough for the furniture to be pretty or cheap: how it treats us during the process also matters. The famous “IKEA effect” adds another angle, because putting something together can make us value it more, as long as we manage to finish it.
The best thing about this project is that it allows us to look at the catalog from another perspective. It is enough to organize a column so that a piece of furniture stops being just a pretty photo, a price or some measurements, and also becomes a promise of work. Before falling in love with a purchase, perhaps it is worth knowing how many pieces separate the initial illusion from the final result. And someone has thought about helping us in the process.
Images | IKEA | Screenshot | Xataka with Nano Banana
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was originally published in
Xataka
by
Javier Marquez
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