Should you include assembly instructions? — a guide & flowchart for the mechanically adept

Does the item require assembly? Start here.

I know a lot of engineering types.

My dudes (and ladies). My friends. MY PEEPS. Your own mechanical aptitude leads you to drastically overestimate everyone else’s ability to tell Tab A from Slot B— which is very strange, given that many of you immediately express alarm when I try to do anything you consider outside my qualifications, like change a lightbulb.

I can’t explain … that … but I can offer some handy tips for when you should vs. should not include assembly instructions in your product packaging.

YOU’RE WELCOME.

I had other plans for this week’s post, but then a series of misadventures involving three canceled Walmart orders, several underbaked articles, and one unknown guy lost and locked out of his car on Pickwick (not my fault, I swear!) got the better of me and now here we are, finally making the flow chart I thought of when I was assembling (without instructions) a lamp I got as a Christmas present several weeks ago.

a blue-and-white graphic displays a flowchart

All jokes aside, it is enormously frustrating to have to figure out how you intended for anything to fit together. That anybody NEEDS to figure that out, as opposed to having it explicitly stated, is kind of a safety concern — you can’t, or shouldn’t, go around assuming that people will infer the right conclusions.

They very frequently won’t — and while innovation is indeed a wonderful thing, not all innovations are good ideas.

Innovations are how you get some redneck with a beer can and a couple of big ideas daisy-chaining extension cords together so he can have a space heater in the man cave he regularly leaves unattended for a couple of hours at a time.

You see where this is going.

Include the assembly instructions.

Save a life, a lamp … maybe a space heater (or three).

Read more #ThursdayThoughts here.