Where's the instructions?

Instructions are going online.

 It used to be that any new gadget you bought came with its own instruction manual which went into great detail about all of your new purchases functions. Not only did the manual explain every possible function that your gadget could perform, regardless of the fact that you would only use about ten percent of these possibilities, it also duplicated all of these instructions in a number of different languages. The resulting booklet was therefore much bigger than really necessary and the sheer volume of information made it harder to find what you were looking for.

Increasingly products are supplied with only a 'getting started' booklet which only contains the most rudimentary functions. The new owner is expected to go to the company website in order to download a PDF of the complete instructions or browse the help section of the website in order to find the answer to their questions.

Ikea has also recently started supplying video instructions on their YouTube channel with the aim of making their assembly processes easier to follow. This is still an experiment by Ikea and time will tell if video instruction will take over from their familiar printed instructions but the days of graphic printed instructions may not be over yet. Photographs and video should in theory be the clearest way to instruct how a multi-stage process should be carried out but a couple of points are worth bearing in mind.

Firstly, photographic pictures contain all of the visual information from the image being captured. This may not be a good idea because much of the information might not be necessary and could even be confusing. A graphic illustration on the other hand focuses only on the pertinent information and omits anything else, thus focusing the viewers attention.

The other aspect to bear in mind about video and photography is that they can show cultural bias. Ikea is a world wide company and a video made in Stockholm might not necessarily be as appropriate to show in South East Asia as it would be in Britain. Whoever we see on film comes with a set of cultural baggage. Illustrations on the other hand can be culture neutral.

Ikea has become a global success story, despite people joking about their instructions being hard to follow. Video and online instruction is a very useful adjunct to traditional instructions but don't count out their printed counterparts just yet.