Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

The IKEA person may have stated the claim in a broad way, but as a thought experiment, is it possible that they're correct despite this study?

> on average, men tend to outperform women on spatial skills, which you'd expect would be relevant to furniture construction.

Could it actually be irrelevant? There's a case to be made there.

Is time of construction, as measured in this study, actually important to IKEA? If the reasons for faster male performance in this study are down to (possibly genetic) advantages in dealing with new spatial problems, or a cultural factor like males having on average more exposure to various kinds of construction, which manifest in them showing a (slight) edge in constructing a brand-new design, well ... due to the manufacturing effect, that advantage should disappear!

With practice, false starts and misunderstandings will go away. At that point, what matters to IKEA? Probably, 'perfect' assembly. It's possible that IKEA found that women showed lower defect rates than men. That would make sense given that they called out that women followed the assembly instructions more closely.

IKEA's claim was simply that 'women are better at assembling flat-pack furniture than men,' and this study wanted to see if the known male edge in understanding spatial problems extended to flat-pack furniture. It apparently does, but that doesn't necessarily mean that women still might not be 'better,' at least from IKEA's point of view.

The results showed that men were rated higher for construction quality.

But I think it's interesting that it takes around 25 minutes to put a trolley together, and it's hard to get a perfect score for construction quality.

The design of the product has a lot more influence on time/quality than gender. And it looks like the design could be improved.

I always assumed that flat pack furniture was similar to cheap commercial furniture without the construction costs, and with lower shipping costs. But it's assembled using the same standard techniques.

Is it possible to design good furniture with much simpler/quicker assembly techniques? Maybe not. But if it is, perhaps there's a commercial opportunity there.

In my experience, the techniques can be quite different.

Flat-pack furniture needs to buildable by just about anyone, using tools that they can be expected to have (screwdriver and hammer only, in practice) or you are willing to include (allen wrench). On top of that, it's usually also designed to be disassembled as well to a degree, since otherwise mistakes and can be permanent and costly. Also, and perhaps most importantly, flat pack furniture almost never uses glue, which is often a very important component of factory assembled furniture.

Factory assembled furniture often makes use of highly specialized and expensive equipment that most people don't even have access to.

For instance, a wood steamer, to bend the back of a chair into a curve, followed by a few days of immobilizing and drying the piece. This sort of step is only cost effective when you are building hundreds of chairs.

Or there might be staples from a staple gun, or springs that can only be installed with the help of a power tool.

And, as already mentioned by parent, most factory-assembled wood furniture nowadays uses dowels or wafers and wood glue. The resulting join is much stronger than twistlock connectors in particle board.

But you can fit more flat-pack chairs in one cargo container, which is about the only reason they even exist. If you are confident in your assembly abilities, a bottle of wood glue, clamps, and a framing square will produce better results on particle-board furniture than following the instructions as written. If not, you'll make a mess and ruin your furniture. And honestly, sometimes you just need something that's good enough to do the job, for $20, that you can just discard the next time you move.

Thanks for validating and expanding on my post with more detail.

I personally wouldn't try using glue on flat-pack furniture, though. For one, the pieces are generally finished there they connect, which means you are gluing to a lacquer on at least one side (possibly both!), and wood glue really wants a porous surface like unfinished wood. Another reason is that much flat-pack furniture (less so Ikea) is super cheap particle board that simply isn't strong enough to support the much weight from its surface like you would force it to with glue.

When used properly, however, wood glue is indeed shockingly strong.

You have to fit the pieces, mark the edges, score the veneer, and remove the strip. It's not usually worth the effort.

> The results showed that men were rated higher for construction quality.

Right, but "quality of first construction by untrained person" does not, due to the manufacturing effect, necessarily mean anything to IKEA.

I'm not sure I understand the angle you are coming from given the following:

In terms of construction scores (from 1 to 10 where 10 represents a perfectly built trolley), men averaged 8.9 with instructions, 7.6 without; the women averaged 7.5 with, and 5.7 without.

So men without instructions do slightly better than women with instructions, and men with instructions do far better..

> In terms of construction scores (from 1 to 10 where 10 represents a perfectly built trolley), men averaged 8.9 with instructions, 7.6 without; the women averaged 7.5 with, and 5.7 without.

The women spent more time building and did a worse job, according to this study.

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