43/2025: The Language of Use

Image © Jose 2025

I believe the design of great instructions, especially when tied to the design of what the instructions are for, is one of the most powerful user-experience enablers or detractors there is. And my experience is that this is a separate activity, typically done at the end, taken on many times by people who are well intentioned and even skilled at creating line drawings or copy, but are not true instruction designers.

Instructional design actually exists as a formal field, though it tends to live closer to education, training, and digital learning than to product design. The term appeared in the 1940s when psychologists and engineers working on military training programs began studying how people learn complex procedures. Since then, entire academic programs have developed around it, Instructional Design and Technology is a master’s-level specialization in many universities, but most of its graduates end up working in e-learning, corporate training, or simulation environments. In industries where the stakes are high, like aviation, medical equipment, or nuclear energy, instructional designers are part of the development chain, creating documentation, manuals, and interactive training tools that are validated along with the product itself. In everyday consumer goods, however, that rigor rarely carries over. The people who design the products and those who explain how to use them often sit in different silos, if they ever meet at all.

Two experiences this weekend. I was born and always lived in hot climates, so fair to say I didn’t grow up with saunas. A family member has one in Seattle, and every time we visit, we really enjoy it, the routine, the cold shower and then getting back in, how we feel after. They say it has an impact on their health and well-being, and they miss it terribly when they are traveling and away. So, we decided to buy a small sauna, just for two. It came in a wooden crate, and I spent Saturday assembling it. My years of assembling IKEA have created a feeling of impatience, disgust, and plain hate for bad instructions. I’m not sure people take into consideration that the entire business model of IKEA would not exist without their clear, universal, complete, simple instructions.

The folks who made this product tried, but they are still miles away. The color photos are good, but many times not close enough, or too close, wrong angle. The text felt hard to follow, I kept reading it over, and over, and over again. I’m glad my brother-in-law warned me there would be extra pieces, nothing like missing or extra pieces to erode any trust in the brand and in ourselves (did I do something wrong? do I need to go back to the beginning?). One thing I like about IKEA is that their design teams work together from the beginning to make things “fool-proof,” which basically means simple for 80 percent of the population, designing parts that, unless assembled in a particular way, won’t work, won’t fit, won’t close, the user gets immediate feedback that something is not right. I’ve had to repeat some IKEA assemblies because I forced myself on the materials and parts. You pay dearly.

And then, while using the battery-operated power tools, the Makita brushless impact driver was driving the screws too deep into the soft cedar wood, so I tried using the user-interface touch membrane they had to make sense of the tool. What a nightmare. A combination of numbers, small line drawings, and capital letters, in a small area hard to use with gloves. The numbers 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 may be for speed, or torque, or impact drive; the line drawings are trying to say too much. I can’t figure out why there is a screw with cuts across the thread, and a bolt with a counterclockwise arrow, and the “A”, does it mean automatic? But if yes, will it know what material I’m using and what I want to do? After pressing back and forth and trying it on a piece of wood, I gave up, went to get an older model I have, simpler, less powerful.

Nevertheless, just before writing this, I went to see if I could learn. I found the instruction manual, read it over and over, no sense. I asked Google, I went to YouTube, still not very clear. To make it worse, there are several similar tools, all with different user interfaces. Unless you are referring to the right model, you might have to go through all the manuals before you find what you are looking for. What a waste of time, what a negative experience.

I know there might be some pros out there who know this, for sure, the ones that use these tools every day. They probably set it and forget, have different tools for different things. And yes, we can all learn. But seriously, this should not be that hard, and I believe it is a great example of bad product, hardware, and instructional design. The set of features the power tool has feels like an attempt to do too much, to offer too many alternatives, and then someone had to make a small user interface on a small tool to try and give all these options to the user. I don’t think it’s the other way around, the instructions designer asking for an entire soup of features and attributes.

If consumers were able to make purchasing decisions based on the simplicity of assembly and usage, my feeling is a large percentage of products would not sell. But even if a consumer is fooled the first time, how many times do we go back, or do we look for alternatives? In the end, great instructions are invisible, bad ones unforgettable.