The sup­port doc­u­men­ta­tion that accom­pa­nies most con­sumer prod­ucts is pret­ty poor.

A few years ago, our fam­i­ly bought a Mur­phy bed that took me two full days on a week­end to build. When the box was deliv­ered to our house, it weighed more than 50 kilo­grams and con­tained dozens of com­po­nents, includ­ing numer­ous bags of screws, bolts, and nuts. The bed includ­ed a 25-page instal­la­tion guide that most­ly relied on images. Here’s a scanned sam­ple of one of the pages (yes, I keep most user doc­u­men­ta­tion for per­son­al purchases):

Notice that the guide min­i­mizes the use of text, a stan­dard that Ikea, the world’s largest fur­ni­ture retail­er, whole­heart­ed­ly embraces. The order of steps is pre­sent­ed as a type of leg­end; the user needs to first look for label 34 and find it in the illus­tra­tion, then com­plete the steps shown in label 35, and so on. Oth­er than this map­ping exer­cise, I found that many of the pages in the guide were clut­tered. One of my most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges in assem­bling the bed was that the screws shown at the bot­tom of the page were not labelled in any of the bags that were packed in the box. There many instances where I found myself scru­ti­niz­ing a bag of screws—and there were at least 20 bags of them—to deter­mine if this was the right tool for a spe­cif­ic step.

Doc­u­men­ta­tion like this is more com­mon than not. When cus­tomers buy a $199 dress­er from a store like Ikea I believe they know the instruc­tions will be mediocre and that there is a chance that parts will be miss­ing. It’s a com­mon exam­ple of doc­u­men­ta­tion that is bare­ly “good enough.”

Know­ing that most con­sumer doc­u­men­ta­tion is poor at best, I was delight­ed to pur­chase a smart ther­mo­stat and dis­cov­er the doc­u­men­ta­tion was actu­al­ly good. Here’s an exam­ple of one of the pages of the instal­la­tion guide:

I love the use of ample white space, the clear and suc­cinct instruc­tions, and the excel­lent illus­tra­tions. In my expe­ri­ence, good illus­tra­tions are a rar­i­ty in documentation.

It is obvi­ous to me that the com­pa­ny’s design team (the com­pa­ny in this case is Nest) put in a lot of effort to make the prod­uct intu­itive and sim­ple. I was able to install the ther­mo­stat in about 30 min­utes with­out a glitch.

My only sug­ges­tion to the com­pa­ny’s sup­port team would be to include a user guide in the box. Cur­rent­ly, if you need step-by-step instruc­tions on oper­at­ing the ther­mo­stat, you need to vis­it Nest’s website.

If the online reviews are any indi­ca­tion, a lot of peo­ple love the Nest ther­mo­stat. Admit­ted­ly, it’s a pre­mi­um prod­uct so it’s design and doc­u­men­ta­tion is notice­ably bet­ter than many products.

Have you expe­ri­enced con­sumer doc­u­men­ta­tion that has impressed you?