PhD student Miles Richardson at the University of Derby has identified a formula establishing the relative ease - or not - of doing-it-yourself with self-assembly furniture. According to Miles, it’s about how the furniture interacts with you: if people struggle they should blame the product, not themselves.

With a white-board full of a massively long set of formulae, Miles analyses just how tricky the operation can be. The formula contains details of how many joints, screws and operations are required as well as factors for difficulty.The final answer from the formula – his ‘frustration factor’ – gives a value for 'assembly difficulty'.

Miles believes that if manufacturers printed his ‘frustration factor’ on the product, consumers would be able to judge for themselves how difficult the product will be to assemble when they get it home.

Said Miles: "It’s surprising but very little research has been carried out in this area.”

“There is a general lack of understanding of the issues that affect self –assembly. Previous research has focussed on the instructions but my research goes beyond that. It looks at how the character of the object interacts with the person assembling it – after all it is the object that defines the instructions to a great extent.”

Miles created scale models of a range of self-assembly furniture and identified common characteristics in these products.

He explained: “I identified seven characteristics that could describe any self-assembly object. I then monitored people attempting to assemble the products, looking at how long each participant took to think about the task and how many errors they made. The way each of the seven characteristics relates to assembly difficulty can then be calculated.”

“This formula could be used by manufacturers to predict how difficult an object is likely to be to assemble before it goes into the shops."