[bambax]

> People had the need to be emotionally invested and get rewards from the process of making the cake not just the end result.

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! ;-)

[clairity]

ooshma is a good story teller and i too remember her lessons (and her determination) from this presentation at last year's female founders conference. =)

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.

[semiAI]

re: "but so too does the esteem we receive from others. the article talks about the former effect, but not the latter"

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

[vosper]

It's sad that the stigma persists of microwaved food being somehow lesser than "real" cooked food. A microwave is just another tool in the kitchen. People shouldn't be embarrassed to use it.

[wfunction]

I mean, it frequently is. I don't know about you but my microwaved food doesn't always get heated evenly. (Sure, maybe it would if I put it there 10x longer at 10% power, but then that would defeat the point of my use of the microwave.) And it's hard to cook things in a microwave... it's far more suited to reheating pre-cooked food. Not that I'm a chef, but it's not a wrong perception IMO.

[weaksauce]

Unless you have an inverter type microwave it's always full power when cooking at 10% it's actually just 10% active time with the magnetron running full blast. As a tool, a microwave is like a blunt instrument unless you have the nicer microwaves. 10% is akin to running the flame to ultra high and only putting the skillet down 6 seconds every minute. Not efficient and not good technique. Coupled with the fact that microwaves operate by exciting the water molecules in the food and you have uneven cooking if there is a large discrepancy between the water content of different foods on the same plate. Finally, without special gear, you can't really brown or crisp anything in the microwave so the end result is more mushy than most people desire.

[franciscop]

I think wfunction was referring to this, that food with a constant water content are still not cooked uniformly: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2011/microwave-oven-diagnost...

[wfunction]

> Unless you have an inverter type microwave it's always full power when cooking at 10% it's actually just 10% active time with the magnetron running full blast.

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.

[rockinghigh]

Food is heated evenly in a microwave only if water is spread evenly in your food. It works well for soups or sauces. Not so well for pasta (it will dry out), bread or meat.

[wfunction]

You're mixing lots of things up here. "It will dry out" has everything to do with the amount of heating and nothing to do with its evenness. Soups/sauces heat well despite uneven heating because of secondary effects like better convection/conduction (not sure which particular effects are more significant) due to the sheer amount of water relative to the rest of the food. The water distribution of the food is not the problem here; the problem is the radiation pattern. A uniform radiation pattern and uniform water content will give you even heating, and a water content that exactly compensates for an awful radiation pattern will also give you even heating.

[nom]

No, what's sad is that so many people can't cook anymore. It's especially bad in the United States.

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.

[fragmede]

> It's impossible to prepare a good tasty meal with a microwave.

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.

[nom]

> 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.

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.

[dragonwriter]

> You can't cook food in a microwave.

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.

[gbog]

I agree that no good food come out of the microwave, but the reason is in the ingredients not in the owen. Cooking good Chinese food, for instance, do not require "many many tools", just the basics you'd find in every kitchen in China, but it requires freshly cut veggies and meat, and different spices, and none of what you eat was processed in a factory (except msg maybe)

[jlg23]

Amen. Good ingredients, a love for food and the ability to tune out those that try to explain that one cannot cook or that cooking requires intense training and a container full of tools.

[yellowapple]

> Use a skillet or a grill, and it's as good as new.

I disagree, though that might be because I enjoy cold pizza.

[andai]

As someone who enjoys cold pizza, I like reheated (skillet) pizza too.

[Cozumel]

Little off topic but to reheat pizza in the microwave put a cup of water in there too, works great then!