(Upvoted since your comment was turning gray. It's a legitimate concern, I think.)
I think the story here is that they were overwhelmed with a high demand during the past "WFH and improve your home year" all while their production and shipment capacity was being more or less randomly reduced (separately in each country) with very little warning.
Stock sync issues? I used to think they had bugs there until I realized they're constrained in two aspects that are both unusually tight at the moment:
a) forecasted availability of products in your particular shipment center
b) forecasted availability of home delivery capacity in your particular region
Note that the two will have to match up for the same week at least (maybe less), or there'll be a pileup. In a normal year this isn't really a problem, there's some slack...
The strategy I eventually landed on was to give up trying to bundle everything into one neat order to save a little money. I've been ordering large/heavy stuff (like sofas/beds) for home delivery in separate deliveries, as soon as I've been able to decide on something. Smaller things I've been picking up outside their nearby store. If I didn't live near an IKEA, I'd order the smaller items by postal/package delivery.
IKEA’s webshop is just a bad frontend for their stores. If you’re unlucky you add items to your cart that you would (according to their check out) have to drive 500 km to pick up. Probably a result of the stores themselves being the warehouse.
Most stores ship your order within 2 days. With IKEA your’re probably going to wait a week for them to handle the order and hopefully ship it.
I think you overestimate the value of random images of mostly empty spaces in people’s homes.
This isn’t a data-grab it’s a sales vector. Make it easy for people to envision their house with your product in it. IKEA’s best marketing is their catalog and showrooms where you can actually see their stuff used in different actually livable rooms and see how they would fit into yours. Same thing but now it’s literally your house.
Iirc, at least in germany they will not distribute the catalog anymore and it's volume decreased significantly in the last years. I think the all time high was around 60million copies, though I might be mistaken on that :-)
Not sure why this is news? The AR "IKEA Place" app [1] has existed since September 2017.
It's very odd that the submission (dated October 2020) suggests that the app is something new.
It's also a pretty bad app -- I tried using it a couple months ago. It failed to render anything on my brand-new iPad, though it worked on my iPhone. It also only has about ~half the current furniture IKEA sells, so I could only try out one of the three desks I was interested in, which made it entirely useless for comparison. Finally, you can't even search for items by name -- you have to navigate a hierarchy of every model the app has.
In other words, it still needs a LOT of work. The app gets occasional maintenance updates but IKEA doesn't seem to be seriously investing in it, unfortunately. The fact it's missing half their furniture is pretty unforgiveable.
This doesn't surprise me very much. I'm gonna rant a bit now.
I used to make consumer facing software for IKEA 10+ years ago and the dynamic back then was that IKEA Communications (the marketing arm) would always have these pretty cool and interesting projects, but they (and we) were constantly running up against the wall that is IKEA Systems.
Basically, whatever Systems says is the law, and they had all kinds of... interesting laws.
For example, Systems owned all environments (production or otherwise) and had very draconian rules with regards to deployments. Everything had to be documented and packaged in certain ways, certain formats had to be used etc. This wouldn't be so bad if you are given clear instructions, but we never were. So we'd do our best, throw packages over the wall and then eventually get them back with pretty useless commentare like "This is not up to code" but no indication of what's missing or otherwise wrong.
Oh and you only had four deployment windows a year, once a quarter. It could take days to get a response, and if you missed the deadline you'd have to wait three months for the next window. Of course, whenever Communications had a project they wanted done it would be stale and out of date if you missed the deployment deadline, so it truly was a deadline as in your project is dead if you miss it. Needless to say, we had to crunch more than a few times.
But it was fun working with Communications – they were a very creative and fun bunch. It's also really cool to visit IKEA HQ down in Älmhult, where they have the photo studios, loads of furniture and props from pretty much any decade, a very cool 3D graphics department etc. We had a lot of fun there.
Anyway, Systems had a way to always make every project so much crappier than it could've been. They were like the lawyers that would come in and tell us that "you can't do this, you can't do that." Systems and Communications didn't really talk to one another either. It was a bit like being the kid in a family where the parents are always passive agressive against one another, and the kid is just sitting there in the middle having to deal with all the crap. The people were nice enough, but the whole setup was draining and you end up with a lot of compromises.
All that said, I had good fun working for IKEA back in the day, and I don't have any regrets. I also obviously have no idea what it's like to work for them now, so the above may have absolutely nothing to do with the AR app and current states of play etc. Maybe it's better now, but my experience having tried to plan both a kitchen and bathroom in the past few months lead me to believe that maybe not that much has changed in the past decade.
The app is a nice curiosity and works as an advertisement but nothing else. Everyone knows IKEA makes the most buck out of crap people buy while coming over to the store to see something they actually planned on buying. It's not a coincidence their stores are like mazes.
Deciding where to put your furniture with AR is from 2017.
I think the 2021 AR move will be that you can buy Ikea furniture, and an AR filter will let you take pics for social media showing Design Within Reach (or whatever fancy brand) furniture in the same places.
And the 2022 version will be when you wear an AR headset at home, so you can pretend all on your own.
Blu Dot also does something similar, at least on iOS. What I like is it's integrated in the browser, so you don't have to install an app. Just tap a button and point your camera at the spot where you want to see the furniture.
It works reasonably well and gives you a general idea of how large the furniture is and how it would fit in the space. Surprisingly, they do a good job with the lighting on the object and if you unfocus your eyes a bit, it does seem like it's in the room with you.
It's crazy that in 2021 they still don't have videos of how to assemble their furniture. I mean, it couldn't be that they charge you for assembly service...
I don’t think videos would help. Their instructions are already exceptionally well made, and I’ve yet to see any IKEA furniture that is hard to assemble.
I have assembled several pieces. From my limited experience, there always seemed one step that was a little hard to get right, whether because of angles, or tight space, or having to hold something else in place while screwing. Other than the one tricky step, everything else was pretty easy.
Free tip: Get a powered screwdriver before you start. It will definitely be worth the investment.
For chests of drawers I certainly recommend powered screwdrivers (IKEA sell cheap, and for this particular use, adequate powered screwdrivers). On the other hand, are you assembling some Ivar shells there’s hardly any screws.
+1000 to the powered screwdriver or small cordless drill.
I've been putting together a lot of furniture recently, and with RSI all the screwdriving is murder on my hands; it makes all the difference to avoid this type of repetitive strain.
To add to what you said, every time I have bought furniture from someone other than IKEA that needs to be assembled, I've missed IKEA's clear instructions.
Oh yes! I’ve from time to time strayed from buying IKEA furniture with the thought that since I can afford it I should get something nicer. But whenever I pay something like 2-3 times as much as I would for some equivalent IKEA piece, the quality is usually worse and the instructions horrendous.
To really get better quality I need to pay something like 5-10 times as much as IKEA prices, and that it is rarely worth.
No, just get vintage furniture. Even if you go for top quality in great condition, it's not going to be 10 times more than IKEA, and it will last forever. Not to mention it won't look like crap.
But some pieces can mess you up with orientation. Is that long board symmetrical or not? If you missed that there are three small dots at the left end of the diagram and two on the right, you'll probably install it backwards.
It's happened to the best of us. If you've ever built a LEGO kit and been off by one stud somewhere early in the project, you'll know the feeling.
I don’t know how long it was since you put together any IKEA furniture, but even things like these are hard to miss nowadays. I don’t know how and if they tests their instructions, but they seem to know quite well what kind of mistakes people tend to do and adapt their instructions accordingly.
32 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadI think the story here is that they were overwhelmed with a high demand during the past "WFH and improve your home year" all while their production and shipment capacity was being more or less randomly reduced (separately in each country) with very little warning.
Stock sync issues? I used to think they had bugs there until I realized they're constrained in two aspects that are both unusually tight at the moment:
a) forecasted availability of products in your particular shipment center
b) forecasted availability of home delivery capacity in your particular region
Note that the two will have to match up for the same week at least (maybe less), or there'll be a pileup. In a normal year this isn't really a problem, there's some slack...
The strategy I eventually landed on was to give up trying to bundle everything into one neat order to save a little money. I've been ordering large/heavy stuff (like sofas/beds) for home delivery in separate deliveries, as soon as I've been able to decide on something. Smaller things I've been picking up outside their nearby store. If I didn't live near an IKEA, I'd order the smaller items by postal/package delivery.
Most stores ship your order within 2 days. With IKEA your’re probably going to wait a week for them to handle the order and hopefully ship it.
fixed that headline for you
This isn’t a data-grab it’s a sales vector. Make it easy for people to envision their house with your product in it. IKEA’s best marketing is their catalog and showrooms where you can actually see their stuff used in different actually livable rooms and see how they would fit into yours. Same thing but now it’s literally your house.
It's very odd that the submission (dated October 2020) suggests that the app is something new.
It's also a pretty bad app -- I tried using it a couple months ago. It failed to render anything on my brand-new iPad, though it worked on my iPhone. It also only has about ~half the current furniture IKEA sells, so I could only try out one of the three desks I was interested in, which made it entirely useless for comparison. Finally, you can't even search for items by name -- you have to navigate a hierarchy of every model the app has.
In other words, it still needs a LOT of work. The app gets occasional maintenance updates but IKEA doesn't seem to be seriously investing in it, unfortunately. The fact it's missing half their furniture is pretty unforgiveable.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ikea-place/id1279244498
Usual product positioning in HN, meanwhile actual discussion is flagged:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25591552
This doesn't surprise me very much. I'm gonna rant a bit now.
I used to make consumer facing software for IKEA 10+ years ago and the dynamic back then was that IKEA Communications (the marketing arm) would always have these pretty cool and interesting projects, but they (and we) were constantly running up against the wall that is IKEA Systems.
Basically, whatever Systems says is the law, and they had all kinds of... interesting laws.
For example, Systems owned all environments (production or otherwise) and had very draconian rules with regards to deployments. Everything had to be documented and packaged in certain ways, certain formats had to be used etc. This wouldn't be so bad if you are given clear instructions, but we never were. So we'd do our best, throw packages over the wall and then eventually get them back with pretty useless commentare like "This is not up to code" but no indication of what's missing or otherwise wrong.
Oh and you only had four deployment windows a year, once a quarter. It could take days to get a response, and if you missed the deadline you'd have to wait three months for the next window. Of course, whenever Communications had a project they wanted done it would be stale and out of date if you missed the deployment deadline, so it truly was a deadline as in your project is dead if you miss it. Needless to say, we had to crunch more than a few times.
But it was fun working with Communications – they were a very creative and fun bunch. It's also really cool to visit IKEA HQ down in Älmhult, where they have the photo studios, loads of furniture and props from pretty much any decade, a very cool 3D graphics department etc. We had a lot of fun there.
Anyway, Systems had a way to always make every project so much crappier than it could've been. They were like the lawyers that would come in and tell us that "you can't do this, you can't do that." Systems and Communications didn't really talk to one another either. It was a bit like being the kid in a family where the parents are always passive agressive against one another, and the kid is just sitting there in the middle having to deal with all the crap. The people were nice enough, but the whole setup was draining and you end up with a lot of compromises.
All that said, I had good fun working for IKEA back in the day, and I don't have any regrets. I also obviously have no idea what it's like to work for them now, so the above may have absolutely nothing to do with the AR app and current states of play etc. Maybe it's better now, but my experience having tried to plan both a kitchen and bathroom in the past few months lead me to believe that maybe not that much has changed in the past decade.
I think the 2021 AR move will be that you can buy Ikea furniture, and an AR filter will let you take pics for social media showing Design Within Reach (or whatever fancy brand) furniture in the same places.
And the 2022 version will be when you wear an AR headset at home, so you can pretend all on your own.
It works reasonably well and gives you a general idea of how large the furniture is and how it would fit in the space. Surprisingly, they do a good job with the lighting on the object and if you unfocus your eyes a bit, it does seem like it's in the room with you.
But even if the instructions are very clear, videos could make it more approachable to people.
Free tip: Get a powered screwdriver before you start. It will definitely be worth the investment.
To really get better quality I need to pay something like 5-10 times as much as IKEA prices, and that it is rarely worth.
It's happened to the best of us. If you've ever built a LEGO kit and been off by one stud somewhere early in the project, you'll know the feeling.