We bought a glamour dollhouse for my 6-year-old daughter for Christmas. It finally arrived a couple of days after new year of 2012.
Yesterday evening, I set up a time to assemble it with my daughter, thinking that I could demonstrate how easy the assembly would be if we read the instructions and work together. However, the installation turned out to be a trial-n-error process. At one time, I thought I had finished the dollhouse, only to find that the top floor (one of the 3) was installed upside down with unpainted side facing up. The problem was not only about aesthetic, I also couldn’t install the partition into the slot on the floor, which was the last step. In other words, I wasn’t be able to identify the problem until the last step.
It was a major frustration, because I had to uninstall half of the dollhouse to be able to flip the floor. One can argue that I am not a handyman, which I agree, but the assembly instruction, being in black and white, doesn’t differentiate some subtle differences. And what is the worst is that any mistakes during the installation do not stop one from continuing.
My daughter had to go to bed without seeing it get done for school has started. Right before she left for her room she comforted me by saying: “We could do it tomorrow.” The installation was finally completed, after 2 hours. I felt good and now I am a semi-expert in dollhouse assembly.
This morning, my daughter’s eyes sparkled when she saw this 5-ft dollhouse standing, just as the 1st time she played “Angry Bird” in iPad a few months ago. But at that time, none of our family read user’s manual of iPad. My 6-year-old learnt to play with it almost as quickly as I did.
It is an industry norm that almost anything we buy today, from glamour dollhouse or drilling software, comes with an instruction or manual. But in reality, people seldom read manual because they do not have time and/or they expect the device or software friendly enough to be figured out. Steve Jobs once commented: “The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people.”
Many people do not want to spend time reading instructions. The best manual is probably the carefully designed structure and graphical user interfaces for software. If technical background is a necessity, by all means have it in user’s manual, but the explanation of how to operate software should be kept minimal for intuitive design.
For drilling software, if roughnecks on the rig and engineers in the office can both run them without going through user’s manual, one of our goals is achieved.