The IKEA of Web Design
Is there a legitimate web design firm heir to the IKEA business model? And if not, what would it take?
I read a nice article today over at the Customer Experience Design blog, which traced over a fairly well-drawn distinction between two schools of customer experience.
The two schools, given by example in this case are:
The "Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.
and
The "IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company's products and services.
Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it's easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client's web-designing nephew. He's cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer's percieved value is high.
But, of course, that's not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it's broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it's contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.
