A couple of weeks back I bought a desk lamp from Ikea. The package came neatly – shrink wrapped, with all the necessary parts to fix it up.

There was an instruction manual that came with the lamp. It’s just a plain manual, on brownish paper, and it looks like this.

There were TWO lines of worded instructions in that manual. Two. And it was repeated in 18 languages. Then, the rest of that manual looked like this:

Not a single word of text. Everything was in simple pictures. Pictures, which told a thousand words.

I found it a breeze to understand what they were saying in those pictures. There is a lot we can learn about usability from this simple manual. I once read from a book (can’t remember where it was from!) “If you interface needs instructions, then its way too complicated.”

Imagine, if the instructions were in text – how much hassle it would be for Ikea to publish that same manuals in 18 languages? How much paper would be wasted?