Not long after coming to Seattle, I bought two pieces of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) furniture from Target. I was really excited and looking forward to building them by my own hands, but the building process was not as pleasant as I’ve expected. I had the experience of building IKEA DIY furniture, which was well designed for the customers and I felt a sense of accomplishment while doing the work. I don’t have to prepare any tools to hammer at the furniture or screw the pieces together, everything was just matched. If I did something wrong, the pieces of the furniture wouldn’t match, and if I did something right, the pieces give off a clink sound as feedback. The pieces of the furniture have natural signals that each joint only matches to another joint. The design reduces the chance of making errors for consumers. IKEA considers conceptual models of the customers while doing the design. It also did good mapping to guide the customers.
The DIY furniture of Target was a different story. They frustrated me again and again. The designers didn’t consider every little part thoroughly and it matters. We can exam the Gulf of Execution first: I intended to screw some of the parts together, but I couldn’t distinguish what kind of screw I should take, there were at least five kinds of screws all packed in one little bag. The instructions were vague, and I actually screwed the wrong ones into the holes, which then took me more time to separate them. Some bolts are much bigger than the holes that they should be inserted into, which made me wondering whether I did it right or not. My intended actions were not directly match the system and it took me extra effort to figure it out. Accordingly, the Gulf of Evaluation was big, it was hard to interpret and wasn’t hatch the way I thought of the system.
Another problem of the furniture is it didn’t provide me certain feedback. For example, while I took the wrong screws, it should have an obvious signs to indicate that I was wrong; while I took the right bolts to insert into the right holes, it should be really easy for me to do so. However, it came out to be opposite to my expectation. My mental model was helpless in building the furniture.
There are still more problems with the DIY furniture. One of these problems is visibility. The visibility of the furniture was poor. The serial numbers of each part was chaotic: some numbers were on the side of the part while some were on the corner or in the middle of the part. The problem took me a while to find the right parts to screw together. The send problem is mapping. The problem generates even worse thing: some of the serial numbers of the parts were different from the instruction, which means the mappings that the designers designed were contradicted to the reality. The failure of mapping made me blamed the wrong cause, which is the third problem; I thought the instruction was wrong while actually the serial numbers were making mistakes. Thus, I spent extra time to find out the real problem and fix what I have done wrong. How confusing and frustrating was that?
Although DIY furniture of Target seems quite easy to build at first, after a close exam, it has a lot of design deficits. While designing everyday things, the designer should stick to the principles of design and also do the test before put the product into the market.
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