Sorry, this is a bit of a rant…
I had to assemble an IKEA flatpack cabinet today.
I always find this process painful because, to me, the instructions are always lacking (and a lot of other flatpack kits have followed IKEA’s trend of picture-only guides). How hard is it to put a name below each component on the parts page (so I know what this weird thing is when it appears on page 22!), or indicate what’s the top/front/back/etc.?
Today it would have been really helpful to know which edge was the top and front for the sides of this kit, rather than flipping back-and-forth through the manual to work it out. The irony is that they got so close to realising this was a factor, since the instructions did actually have two procedures (depending on whether your ceiling was high enough to stand the cabinet up after assembly or whether you needed to assemble it in-situ).
Is it just me and does everyone else just find it easy to follow the instructions, or do a lot of other people struggle with them too?
I used to write a bunch of work instructions at my previous job, not for customers but employees. It’s definitely a skill but my God they can get long with all the details. I once wrote instructions with a part to screw a unit into a fixture. It took 5 pages, there was 1 screw.