With great publishing products available, why is today’s technical documentation so poor?
22 February 2011
Process type: Manufacture
Martyn Day’s ‘rant du jour’ came about when had to make his own bed. We are not talking sheets, pillow cases and duvet covers here but self-assembly furniture. Here he documents his frustrations
I always knew I was a heavy sleeper. However, I didn’t realise quite how heavy. Last Sunday at 4am my bed gave in to gravity, suffering a catastrophic failure.
On inspection, my final and most ludicrous bodge fix (9-inch zinc plated masonry nails), had caused the wood to split, leading to things going bump in the night. Deeming the structure dangerously unsound and beyond repair, I headed off to the ‘British’ interior design specialists, Ikea, for a post-modern replacement.
Unfortunately the bed I bought came in two flatpacks, both longer than my car, so I had to open the boxes and stack the wood across the back seats. Apart from being heavy, there were over 50 individual pieces, two big bags of screws and a manual. It seems I had myself a bit of a project.
Eventually all the pieces were in the bedroom, I had a coffee in one hand and a flat headed screwdriver with an inappropriately short shaft in the other. The pictorial instructions indicated I needed a Phillips head screwdriver and a minimum of two people to assemble. Unsuitably equipped I figured I was all set to go.
Deeming the bed structurally unsound and beyond repair, I headed off to the ‘British’ interior design specialists, Ikea, for a post-modern replacement
Six hours later, I had very sore hands, a bag of de-threaded screws, a twisted and broken tipped screwdriver and still only three quarters of a bed.
Of course, the source of all my ills were those damned comic book instructions which were truly diabolical. As the international language of self-assembly product is obviously ‘cartoon’, identification of all the components means visually comparing what’s in the box vs what’s drawn.
But when 80% of the components look the same length and are only differentiated by how many tiny holes they have, or the patterns the holes are in, I couldn’t help but feel that this is what it must be like to read Braille.
Tech writes and wrongs
In my day job I am spoiled. I get to play with all these wonderful 3D design systems, see the latest technology and understand the potential benefits of the downstream reuse of this modelling work. However, I can’t actually remember buying a product that has used these 3D animation or contemporary documentation tools that have been around for years.
It seems the state of the art in technical documentation ended with Adobe FrameMaker, around the same time the Osmonds had their last number one.
Using 3D models in digital documentation seems like a no-brainer to me but today, at best, the digital manual is a PDF of the paper one that you lost / threw away / burnt in anger. Diagrams are isometric.
Why is today’s technical documentation so poor, given the effort we put into virtually building these products in the first place?
There is no shortage of 3D publishing formats. Over the last four years we have seen all out war on what will be the most popular collaboration format - DWF, 3DXML, U3D, XVL, JT, CSF… Every CAD vendor invented its own, which none of the others would promote or use.
And then of course there was Adobe, which, before garroting its own 3D PDF initiative by ‘letting go’ the entire team, had at least enabled some capability to import and display interactive 2D and 3D CAD models in PDF.
I’ve yet to get documentation with one of those in it either.
There are some great documentation and publishing products out there now: Inventor Publisher, PTC Arbortext, Dassault Systèmes’ 3DVia Composer, SolidWorks eDrawings, NX MasterDrafting, CADfaster, Actify Spinfire, Oracle AutoVue…. the list goes on and on.
Author!
I’m starting to think that the reason we don’t see much reuse of CAD data in consumer documentation is that there are cultural problems in exposing this data with the technical authors.
With the additional problem that if the document department has a paper-based, static mindset and workflow, then 2D output is all they think they need and is ultimately self-limiting?
In fact if a paper-based manual is the target product then a 3D equivalent would be just a lot more work, while a PDF of the 2D document is literally a byproduct of the existing process.
Obviously, it’s too early to only have digital, dynamic 3D instructions available via the web. As then only the Internet-rich would be able to assemble Ikea furniture but I can’t but help feel that our industry fails to invest in the documentation phase of the process and many see it as an afterthought. In tough economic times, it can be this department that thins out the quickest.
Conclusion
Manuals, assembly instructions and product documentation should be a celebration of the engineering knowledge and effort that has gone into designing products and the first source of help customers should resort to. Well-designed documentation saves money in lower support calls and in field maintenance and captures employee knowledge.
My bed is now fully assembled and I am, in fact, sat upon it writing this article. However I am not sure if I will sleep all-that well tonight. I’ve just discovered that there were ten big screws left over… and I’m told Ikea never gets that wrong.
If you have come across any slick product manuals/instructions that utilise 3D, please drop me a line so I can highlight these wonderful and rare documents!
Comments on this article:
Have a look at Cortona3D.Com. We have some great examples and I also have a great example of IKEA furniture being assembled in 3D with instructions. Would be delighted to give you a copy to review!
Posted by Matthew Booth on Tuesday 22 2011 at 09:13 PM
I don’t wish to seem rude but that product looks exactly like all the others (Lattice especially)- and the worrying lack of pricing information tells its own tale….
Froma quick trawl of the online demos it just looks overly complex. What most of us want is something like the ability to create a picture box in Indesign or Quark, import the model, rotate to the right view, change the line rendering styles, move/hide parts, add explosion lines, arrows, graphic elements etc - all in the context of the page.
I am left wondering why, all these companies with all these very clever people programming all these complex links to PLM systems cannot just get it that a plug in module to Indesign, Quark or Illustrator (which between them covers probably 80% of the graphics market - millions of users) that can enable this?
It is so blindingly obvious to me - am I the only one that thinks this? If you want to know why the majority of manuals are crap consider this - the last time I attended a demo of 3D VIA the trainers suggested just using Word to suck all the still images into. That is the mentality - sell a £6/7k app to do the hard work, and rely on a word processor to do the final layout.
Posted by Kevin Quigley on Wednesday 23 2011 at 01:19 AM
I think we have all experienced the same pains of product assembly that you’ve mentioned and the poor documentation that is meant to assist with the process. As you also mentioned, many companies today haven’t realized the true value behind having up-to-date service information available to their end-users. There are plenty of metrics out there that show the benefits a manufacturer can realize when accurate product information is provided for the end user and/or field service maintenance personnel - especially when that information is linked to the original CAD data.
I’d encourage you to take a look at this 3 minute software demo video - it addresses the issues you mentioned of image rotation, moving parts, etc. Arbortext realizes the value of everything you’ve mentioned and is working hard to meet the needs of all involved in the lifecycle of a product. This isn’t my attempt at a sales pitch, I really do think this software that Arbortext will be releasing will be great for the industry.
Posted by Katie McNeil on Wednesday 23 2011 at 04:21 PM
On a non-CAD related front (but still very related to this story): for Christmas, we got my daughter a plastic toy car that one can sit in and scoot around (a Cozy Coupe, for those familiar). The instructions were something like 38 steps. Wow, I thought. As I was unwrapping the pieces, I noticed a sticker that read “For detailed assembly instructions, please visit our videos at http:// .... “. Brilliant! I could sit here and try to guess what the pictures mean, or I can watch someone assemble this, and mimic that. Laptop, WiFi, and a cup of coffee - boom. All assembled. When manufacturers learn to more closely associate the instructions (text, pictures, or video) with the actual product, they will have fewer peeved customers.
Posted by Alan Belniak on Wednesday 23 2011 at 06:34 PM
I think we need to distinguish here between consumer level instructions and professional service manuals. Professional service manuals - cars, aircraft, ships, complex industrial products are fairly well catered for with tools like 3D VIA, Arbortext etc. In these markets, where a maintenance engineer is on site or in a factory working on a job, having animated step by step procedures or BOM highlighted explosions is useful - more so that a printed document.
Where I am coming from (and I think Martyn) is the consumer product market where we need to set up a new electronic device, assemble a chest of drawers, or put together a childs toy. These all demand a significantly higher standard of graphic design and thought than a simple isometric view, hit explode, add a BOM approach. Moreover, there is just not the need for the instructions to be fully linked to a PLM system, and update - because the product does not update, or it it does then a new set of instructions are produced.
My son is into Lego and other assembly toys right now. Have you ever seen a Logo kit instruction manual? Step by step, full colour, well designed. As I understand it these are all still rendered views imported into a layout app - much as I do myself.
I return to my central argument - graphic designers, product designers need tools that plug into standard industry design apps like Creative Suite and Quark. If PTC introduced “Project Adobe” and brought out a product that was Creo Indesign or Creo Illustrator - plug ins to Adobe apps - they would sell. But I suspect PTC are too far down the Arbortext route now and it will take a bright agile new start to do this.
I did look at that video Katie. I’m puzzled as to why you think this is new? I’ve been attending demos of products like these aimed at the “big product” market for many years now. In fact I’m going to see Autodesk Inventor Publisher tomorrow again.
I suggest you take a look at this video on Google Layout - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joco2cG7Oig
Layout is not perfect by any means, but it does get closer to the end product I am suggesting here. Instead of Layout, imagine all that in Indesign or Quark, being able to import any CAD format.
Posted by Kevin Quigley on Sunday 27 2011 at 10:05 AM
Good story and very familiar….you just left out the bit about the missing parts and having to make 5 trips back to store to get them!
With regards to the assembly instructions this is a pet issue of mine. You ask why there is so much crap around? Simply because good instructions cost money, and that money is not deemed important by many until issues with assembly start to impact on sales.
The other factor is the sheer lack of affordable documentation tools. You mention Framemaker. For 90% of products (think IKEA for example) you just need a system that can knock up a 4 page document - so Indesign or Illustrator are more suited. Here’s the rub though, how to get 3D data into those apps? Sure you can use DWG/DXF/or in some cases direct .ai imports - but that is a slow laborious process and one way only (as you always need to edit the files).
What is needed is simple. A comprehensive documentation system where the user can directly import the CAD data, turn parts on and off, move parts, explode parts, section parts, annotate parts (and retain the link to the part), produce output to vectors in Thick n Thin formats - black and white - for low cost printing, and be able to do graphics only annotations (like people, hands, faces, legs, arrows etc) and maintain a link to the data for easy updating.
Yes you could say apps like Arbortext/Lattice/3D Via Composer etc can do much of this, but that cannot do all. And they are hellish expensive.
No what we needed was Adobe to build this into Indesign and Illustrator by leveraging the 3D PDF technology….but we all know what happened there - and sell it as part of the Creative Suite so it would be on most designer’s desks. But they didn’t.
Anyway, my rant over. If you do want to see all this in an app that costs under £350 try Google Layout, that comes part of SketchUp Pro. This does all the above and more. The key - editing in the context of the document page. Simple innit?
Posted by Kevin Quigley on Tuesday 22 2011 at 05:26 PM