Wish I had thought of that

Last night, I put together a large piece of fitness equipment for the basement. To save on shipping, some final assembly was required. Normally, this type of project can be daunting. In this case, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how quickly it came together. Much of that can be tied to the quality of instruction.

Build-it-yourself projects can be quite a variable proposition. Done correctly, you can actually save a lot of money. Ikea built an entire business based on the model! That rosy picture only works when you have solid instructions. There are few things in life more frustrating than trying to assemble a project with terrible instructions. Since these projects often involve delivery from foreign countries where English is not the first language, the overall quality of instructions can often range from poor to miserable.

One example of miserable instructions came when I had to put a bike together for the kids. The Huffy plant decided to save money by having one common set of instructions for all of their models. Unfortunately for me, it was up to me to figure out which model I actually had--there was no key guiding you to the correct set of instructions. Even more infuriating, there were no clear pictures that actually matched the parts that I had on hand. In a lot of cases, I just had to use my best judgment and hope that everything fit together properly. I'm just glad neither of the kids had any serious accidents on the bikes. We also have upgraded them to newer models. The kids are lucky because these bikes came pre-assembled!

The actual reason for my post is to highlight one of the positive examples. In this case, the vendor actually made it easy for me. The instructions were in perfect English. There were pictures at every step which clearly identified exactly what you were supposed to do. Even better, the little screws and washers that you needed for each step were shrink-wrapped in a separate portion of this package and clearly labeled! I was actually able to assemble the entire piece in about two hours.

I'm sure that the cost of gathering the parts and getting them lined up on the card was not trivial. At the same time, I'm sure that this detailed organization makes it much more likely for consumers to be able to assemble their projects without any problems. Each service call or return is very costly. I'm sure they have probably done an analysis and figured out that this is much more cost-effective. Not only that, it has certainly made me a very satisfied customer at the very start!