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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

I've had mixed success with their manuals. While I admit there is a certain genius to it, I don't fully share your enthusiasm. Maybe I'm stupid but I feel like some words could really help to speed up the deciphering of the instructions.

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One piece of Ikea furniture I assembled had two different depths of the same diameter nut. A single sentence warning about using the correct depth nut at one point would have saved me approximately 90 minutes of frustration.

Their manuals start with a list of parts, including the part number. You can see that number in the build steps too. If there are two parts that look alike, you can put them in two separate piles next to each other, so you know you should check if you've got the right one when you need a part of one of these piles.

I usually sort all the different small parts at the beginning of building something. It's nice to know that all the parts are there and you don't need to search for them.

If you look at steps 5 and 7 in this installation guide https://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/vidga-corne... you'll see that they have a way to tell you to use one screw vs another, but it's also true that Ikea's instructions aren't foolproof. This is just one example of how they really need to continue testing and improving their instructions because clear instructions are hard, and writing instructions without text is just making your job of communicating information that much harder.

At the start of the manual, the fasteners are shown to-scale and with a part number. Compare to the scale and you don't have issues.

I mentioned it elsewhere - though not that I've learned it the hard way - that IKEA instructions have extremely good attention to details. Yes, some warnings would've been useful, but after being burned by it once, I realized that if you look carefully, all elements are drawn both to scale, and accurate with respect to shape and attachment points - meaning, the steps are actually unambiguous, but you have to pay attention to those tiny details, sometimes 1mm or less in size.

Generally they will handle this case with a diagram of both depths of bolts with one of them being circled and crossed out to designate which to use.

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