IKEA

I have put together a fair amount of pre-fabricated furniture in my day. I have been hired by numerous friends and relatives to do this, as I am quite good at it. Perhaps this stems from my elementary school years: I was quite the Lego enthusiast. Often, when you buy this pre-fabricated particle board furniture, you are confronted with a bewildering assortments of screws, bolts, boards, and directions in Chinese. I happen to have the tedious personality that revels in these sorts of tasks. Regardless, it requires extreme patience - and even a bit of improvisation - to put those things together. It took me a full four and a half hours of concerted effort to assemble my current desk at home.

If you have ever bought or assembled furniture from Ikea then you already know where I am going with this post.

Ikea is kind of like a Chic-Euro-Wal-Mart-Lego store. They set up dozens of display rooms which allow an up-close examination of their products. If you see a chair, mobile, lamp, et cetera that you like, you jot down its respective product code. You conclude your shopping by walking through their warehouse and grabbing the (usually) unassembled product off the shelf. You check out, buy a pretzel, and then go home.

When you go home and open the product up, you are confronted by a simple set of directions, a few easily-recognizable pieces of hardware, and often a one-time-use torque wrench or screwdriver. It's a delight. In fact, it's SO MUCH FUN that Ikea furniture dominates maybe 40% of my and my wife's barn-apartment. Ha!

Please take a look at this link. It leads to assembly instructions of many of Ikea's products, and I think their simplicity is brilliant! Click on either of the "Billy Shelves." (which require you use some of your own tools) Since Ikea is a major international company, I guess it behooves them to have clear, universal visuals like this. It changed the entire way I look at these instruction manuals, and now I don't think I can ever go back to the awkward visuals of other manuals. Ikea "made the assembly message" of my furniture very clear. I think that this is a very important message, and designing manuals like Ikea is the sort of work I'd like to do after graduating!

Considering the money that Ikea saves by not assembling their furniture, I'm sure they value the clarity of their manuals very highly.