IKEA catches so much shit for their instructions, but everything about their assembly process is way better than other cheap crappy flatpack furniture (say, the stuff at Target) including the instructions.

Not sure why this meme exists that IKEA furniture is difficult to assemble. I'm no genius when it comes to handiwork for sure, but I never had issues with IKEA stuff.

I recently assembled my first piece of non-IKEA furniture.

I think the misconception might stem from the fact that

* IKEA instructions for even very simple things like shelves are often up to 20 pages long. A lot of steps are very simple, but there are lots of them.

* IKEA furniture parts often have many markings on them to make them unique. This is necessary for reuse across products, but also identifiability for above-mentioned instructions.

The shelf I recently assembled had none of these "problems". In fact, it only had 2 types of structural metal bars that were identical except for length, and boards to go on top of those bars.

The instructions were 2 pages of text. Full paragraphs worth of text. It included sentences like "Connect the vertical corner pieces such that the second-to-last lower peg of the top piece connects to the topmost peg of the lower piece".

That one sentence takes around 10 seconds to parse, 30 seconds to visualize and then 1-2 minutes to lay out with the physical pieces in front of you.

I would estimate around 80% of that time is waste, compared to just printing those instructions using one IKEA-style diagram.

Also, text may skip some things that the visualization will have to show explicitly.

If I'm unsure which screw they really mean here, which orientation I should have that piece in etc., I can just look really closely at the drawing and identify exactly what they mean. See the different layers of depth and how they cover each other to see the exact order of things. See the the exact drill holes or other marks to disambiguate things.

Maybe it's just that some people think more in words others more in images and prefer instructions of the corresponding type.

The same IKEA instructions are used around the world where English is not the primary language, so it could be argued that benefits IKEA but not users, and that IKES should translate their instructions into dozens of languages. I think your example supports the idea that IKEA is making the right call here. I've always been impressed with how clear each step is, both for me and for people who don't speak English. Or Swedish, really.

Works very well for Lego instructions though. I think the main difference is that people don't buy IEKA for the enjoyment and challenge of assembling it.

I think the best demonstration of how fantastic Lego instructions are is to buy a set from one of their competitors. Nearly any of their competitors. I really drives home that is actually hard to get right.

And I do think IKEA are close to Lego in this.

It's everything from ensuring you illustrate dimensions of different parts in a predictable way; choices of angles, and accounting for the fact people are awful at mentally adjusting for movements in 3d, so if you don't make it easy to align the drawings with "reality" things instantly get harder. Getting shading right. Not making the steps jump too quickly.

> And I do think IKEA are close to Lego in this.

Ugh. Assembling some (most?) non-IKEA flat pack furniture is so terrible. They often try to use the same pictures without word format, but without doing the drafting to back it up.

The one IKEA experience I had that was truly awful was a two-box set that had multiple manufacturers; we ended up with box 1 from one and box 2 from the other, but both had pretty much the same content. Getting all of the first box back into the box after having built that was very demotivating. I now know to double check that all of the numbers match, not just the big number when getting a two box set.

Never had any problems assembling ~200 IKEA packs.