Decoding user friction and the IKEA-effect in education
Our team at AcceleratED spends considerable amounts of time trying to understand needs and wants of teachers in schools across Ethiopia so that we can design products and services that have high levels of uptake and engagement. Our offerings include teacher trainings, learning inputs like lesson plans, question banks and blended learning kits, and actionable insights on student learning gaps. While most of our solutions have high adoption rates, a few do have lower levels of engagement than expected.
For example, over the last year, we intensively trained a certain batch of teachers in lesson plan development and supported them in building high-quality weekly lesson plans. However, after a few weeks, teachers reverted to older versions of their lesson plans that are quite inadequate to cater to a student centred learning approach.
Why does this gradual decline happen? How do we increase the persistence of our interventions? How do we build teacher-habits that stick?
We set forth to investigate.
Most product developers and design thinking evangelists attribute low engagement to user friction. Friction refers to anything that prevents a user from accomplishing a goal. The devil often comes in many names and many forms. In this amazing piece, User Friction is identified as a hierarchy of three levels:
- Interaction Friction
- Cognitive Friction
- Emotional Friction
In our case, we’ve been actively seeking to identify and address pain points for our teachers through various techniques including in-depth focus group discussions, user journey maps, classroom observations and other forms of data tracking. Over the past year, in a quest to minimise teacher workload and teacher inputs, we have continually tweaked our products and delivery mechanisms to be as simple and as user-friendly as possible.
Despite these efforts, some of our products still have low levels of engagement. So, what gives? Are there other factors at play?
As noted earlier, when our initial efforts over the past year to get teachers to develop high-quality lesson plans didn’t work as well as we had expected, our first reaction was to overcompensate and to provide teachers with fully developed plans. Luckily, given our extreme lean approach to product development and rapid iteration philosophy, we sought teacher feedback after only a couple of plans were developed.
In a recent focus group discussion, teachers revealed some intriguing and perhaps even counterintuitive insights. Our research team, supported by the SPRING team were talking to teachers on how we could provide access to readymade, detailed lesson plans and questions banks. While most participating teachers agreed that our lesson plan and question bank samples were indeed very helpful and would make their lives much easier and significantly improve their classroom teaching, they had an important feedback point: these 100% pre-made materials would make the teachers “more lazy [sic]”.
Teachers want to contribute to the development of these learning materials — to make them their own. They do not want a top-down tool that someone is forcing them to use. They, in effect, want materials that are almost complete, but with some room for customisation and for individualisation. Our team had a slight inkling towards this, but wanted to get actual confirmation for the hypothesis.
So, teachers actually want interaction, cognitive and emotional friction in using these new lesson plans!?!
Welcome, IKEA-effect!
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.
The price is low for IKEA products largely because they take labor out of the equation. With a screwdriver, wrench and rubber mallet, IKEA customers can very literally build an entire home’s worth of furniture on a very tight budget. But what happens when they do?” They “fall in love with their IKEA creations. Even when there are parts missing and the items are incorrectly built, customers in the IKEA study still loved the fruits of their labors.
The IKEA effect was identified and named in a Harvard Business School study. The IKEA effect is described as “labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor: even constructing a standardized bureau, an arduous, solitary task, can lead people to overvalue their (often poorly constructed) creations.”
Product designers were familiar with the IKEA effect long before it was given a name. For instance, when instant cake mixes were first marketed in the 1950s, many homemakers were resistant because the instant mixes made cooking “too easy”, which made their labor and skill feel “undervalued.” Because homemakers didn’t feel “invested” in the baking process, they put no value on the product. In response to this problem, the producers of the cake mixes made a simple change in the recipe: homemakers were required to add an egg. By adding one more step — cracking an egg — homemakers felt like they were actually baking, which resulted in increased instant cake mix sales.
Charles Duhigg, in his book Smarter, Faster, Better, describes an interesting anecdote of the IKEA effect in action in an education context.
Administrators of a well-funded yet, failing elementary Cincinnati school had embraced the idea of using data to inform education, and they were armed with a sophisticated software system that tracked students’ performance, and made it available online to teachers and parents on an easily accessible dashboard. The hope was that the data would allow educators to target students with exactly the kind of individual assistance they needed; but measurable progress had yet to be seen.
In truth, most of the school’s teachers rarely looked at the data on the students’ dashboards. So the school experimented with a disruption that forced teachers to actively engage with the information, instead of passively viewing it on the screen. Teachers were required to spend at least two afternoons a month in a new “data room” where they participated in a mandatory exercise to transcribe the data onto individual index cards and tabulated statistics by hand. Essentially, the school was intentionally complicating the handling of data: the process was more cumbersome and time-consuming, but in the end the information was “stickier.”
These emerging insights indicate that like cholesterol, not all types of friction are necessarily bad. The next task for our team is to develop learning materials that include a dose of healthy friction while spotting and minimising unhealthy friction.
Isolating the healthy vs. unhealthy friction types and figuring out the right balance will be an ongoing pursuit for our team.
About AcceleratED:
AcceleratED is an innovative, award-winning social enterprise that blends technology and behavior design to promote active learning in primary classrooms. We are on a mission to rescue teachers and students from boring, scary and ineffectual classrooms.
Through regular mentoring, trainings and classroom observations, we provide teachers with essential skills and complementary learning inputs like multimedia modules for blended learning sessions, activity kits and data analytics to help them boost student learning while increasing student participation in the classroom.
