(Consumer electronics) Really bad instructions, arrrgh!
Roman_K2
Posts: 1,252
Of recent (2010-2020's) I've noticed that the quality of assembly instructions, packing lists and other documentation for stuff in general is deteriorating.
I'm talking about 3-inch square Dell "Quick Start" guides (be sure to have your 4x reading glasses handy) and Amazon order slips.
Several weeks back I decided to make a move on this idea I had to practice sketching figures from 1080 (width) by 1920 (height) source renders made in DS, and all that would be required is the ability to rotate the monitor 90 degrees. I think monitors are getting lighter which helps to make this possible.
Anyway I took a chance on special monitor stand on Amazon. Came ok, lots of solid steel (looks like) but indecipherable parts and bags and bags of screws, enough to scare away the most ardent tinkerer!
It turns out that most of the screws are just the vendor covering their collective butts in case things go wrong - my particular, very light weight moniter required only four of the smallest machine screws and washers. Still...
The thing that threw me the most was that much of the aforementioned solid steel did not look like it was going to bend for love or money. Are you ready!! Get this - it turned out that the parts were machined "just so" eg. rock-solid UNTIL you've assembled the whole thing. After that ,applying pressure from the edge of the screen (assuming most monitors are around 24 to 30 inches wide I guess) provides just enough leverage for the thing to pivot in the direction you want.
Have a gander at these "instructions" though. Arrrrrrgh! And now they want me to write a product review???!!!
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Comments
They're obviously written by someone who's first language isn't English. I think it was far more common that manuals were written by someone fluent in the respective language.
You needed instructions for that! Kids, what do they teach them now days.
Hey, I'm a child of immigrants - migrant "boat" people who didn't speak a word when they reached their destination. With the monitor and its stand example I was only commenting on the production stream and the final quality assurance inspection, not the author of the work.
Going on a bit further: the technical drawings are obviously top notch, but since they include sketches of tiny screws (and the even smaller holes that the screws are supposed to fit into) they need to be larger than 2.5 inches square in the final presentation.
I've done three air conditioner installs in the last 2 years... you have to have your duct tape certificate to do those! I think two of the "manuals" shipped from NC, eg. Eastern United States where they presumably still speak English... again, technical illustrations of optional tiny parts blown way down with accompanying text labels that are less than 1 mm high.
Another recent one here is Samsung tablet computers. Manual ships internet or wi-fi only so tough luck if you don't have either of those, and if you do happen to, finally, get a manual it will have micro-illustrations and tiny, obsure text about the "nano" SIM card option. Not sure what "nano" means in this context?? You'll also have zero chance of the store clerk helping you, on this side of the pond. And perish forbid if you want technical information about the stylus!
In my opinion Apple is like that too. Your call is important to us so please hold!
Cognitive trouble (and a sort of visual impairment) as a result of a head injuries. Can happen to anyone. Really though, it *can* be a rather heavy assembly so like an air conditioner) you want to get it right so that it doesn't tip over.
In the end it was a case of just slowing down and positioning a bright lamp and getting out the old reading glasses and studying the pictures VERY carefully.
Ah, this sort of Janglish, Spanglish, clearly-not-his-native-language manusls stuff has been around a LONG time. As far back as maybe the 80s I remember reading about an instruction on a printer-assembly manual or some such thing that said something like "Do not subject the device to extreme vertical shock" ....which, it turned out, was simply TRYING to say "do not drop." :D
..."vertical shock", isn't that usually what a lightning bolt causes?
Covers also do not hit with a sledgehammer
If the cover doesn't freaking close, they might HIT it with a sledgehammer, tho! :D :D
Many of the accessories and goods sold in Amazon are white-labeled goods i.e. they are made in bulk by foreign (you know where) manufacturers catering to their local markets. Many marketing agencies around the word place bulk orders for these items from foreign B2B portals (like Alibaba) and after importing, repackage and rebrand them using their own brand. The product promotional images, packaging design and manuals are also procured along with the goods, and based on the targeted region of sales, are translated from the original foreign language usually using some automated software. Often there would be multiple marketing agencies selling identical goods probably from the same foreign supplier but under different and often competing brands.
You can often identify those white-labeled goods by looking at the promotional images or packaging. If the branding of the product stands out distinctly from the package design like the logos were photoshopped on top of the original design or are just glued stickers then you know what it is.
There's even an interesting video on such supply chains made by Gamers Nexus in the context of gaming chairs.
Ha ha... that's pretty funny. I liked how the $1,200 Herman Miller chair was at times downgraded to more like $200-250 in the very rough "blindfold' testing.
The seat cushion that wore out after only SEVEN DAYS was also a bit of a wake-up call.
To sum up, a number of vaunted "gaming chairs" come from the same general area and the R&D is zero or less. A lot of it is just a case of slapping on a logo on a fairly generic design and calling it "NEW!".
Ha ha FOB sticker price from SE Asia is $75 U.S. for 400 units!
Haha.
Heh heh... I have personally watched the UPS guy drop a laptop box. IIRC we got the vendor to repeat the delivery with a "fresh" unit. Nevertheless there was a 3 inches square "quick start guide" in the box... and this particular vendor specializes in serving users who are either blind or have some degree of vision loss.
You can't make this stuff up!!!
I have been involved with the manufacture of the design of a spacecraft transport container recently. It's a biggie and it's expensive, but the contents cost 50x the container, and with luck it'll be used hundreds of times. Now, we are English & most of the transports will be by Brits, but the final trip for each spacecraft in the box is to France where it's packed by Brits & unpacked by French. The container is very complex (air conditioning, 22 electric motors with multiple leadscrews all over the place, a built in dehumidifier, compressor, test ports, winch, data recorders, air sampling ports etc etc) and there is a 130 page handbook to tell you how to use it. The box had been used by the Brits without problems 5x within the UK before sending it to France. First unload in France, a HUGE BANG as a massive weld failed. The operator had found all that English too difficult and looked at the photos only. Which was a problem. The spacecraft was stuck in the box with a failed way to get it out. The further damage caused to get the spacecraft out without damage was considerably more extensive than the original massive failure.
So, even extensive handbooks, well written by a native, agreed and approved by enough people to make a comittee are not always helpful if read by someone not reading their own native language. I am not sure how this one is going to be got around. A technical translator costs a fortune, we are contracted to supply a handbook in English and the customer refuses to pay for a translation... I suspect the customer's trainer will be sent to train the French as it'll be cheaper than a full translation. Mad, mad world we live in.
Regards,
Richard
But, you didn't have a youtoob video of the procedure...
I agree about the instructions thing, but it's not just consumer electronics, it's pretty much everywhere... lots of stuff is coming with instruction sheets that look like they are copies of copies of copies, but you can tell they are actually just poorly printed.
You'll have an exploded drawing of an assembly which is comprised of several different sized fasteners, the drawing doesn't contain any call-out info as to what is what because on the page where the hardware is listed they opted to show all the hardware in "full-size" drawings, grouped by what packets they came in... the idea being they don't have to translate this part into multiple languages and the assembly drawings will make it clear as to what goes where... but the exploded assembly drawings end up reducing the image of the hardware to little blobs of ink because most likely the original drawings were meant to be printed much larger... my favorite is when they don't even bother to have a hardware list and everything just comes in one bag.
The other thing I keep seeing is assembly steps that are either out of order or poorly thought out, like where you can't attach something or access something because something else is now blocking the part.
I think physical instruction sheets are probably going to get worse as more manufacturers are content to just toss in a sheet that says "watch this YouTube video"... Which to me is an insufferable injustice... not only are they all bone gratingly painful to watch, they always have someone with the most annoying voice and background music which I can only guess was originally intended for a 70s porno movie.
Not the same issue, but equally annoying are multilingual instructions where they don't separate the instructions by language... in the US that's usually English, Spanish and French... fine if each gets it's own section, but infuriating when you see something like this...
" 5.A. Turn base washer counter clockwise while lifting hanger rod stud and treading it into coupler nut. Gire la arandela de la base en sentido contrario a las agujas del reloj mientras levanta el espárrago de la varilla de suspensión y lo pisa en la tuerca del acoplador. Tournez la rondelle de base dans le sens inverse des aiguilles d'une montre tout en soulevant le goujon de la tige de suspension et en l'enfonçant dans l'écrou du coupleur. B. Replace cover and tighten retaining bolts. Vuelva a colocar la tapa y apriete los tornillos de sujeción. Remettez le couvercle en place et serrez les boulons de retenue."
I feel like I just had a stroke and words stopped making sense... like who the eff thinks that's a good idea to just transition from one language to another with no segue.
Usually all of these complaints are due to cheapness, laziness and lack of concern for the consumer experience.
The best one I have ever heard of, was someone at the local shipyard translating manuals from finnish to russian by just changing the font to cyrillic - Beats even Google translations
I've been working on various computers for 38 years. In all that time, I've never found any good computer-related documentation. I wasted hundreds of dollars on computer books that were terrible as well.
A few months ago, I built a new computer, composed of parts selected from a "shopping list" provided by some of my friends here in the DAZ forums. I was horrified to see the instructions consisted of only pictures! I couldn't get any solid information or instructions from pictures alone! I wasted a few weeks grumbling to myself about the pitiful documentation, then finally just finished the job based on my own intuition.
A few weeks ago I bought a glucose monitoring kit because I am borderline diabetic. Again, the instructions only contained pictures. I couldn't finish the assembly. Instead I had a massive panic attack over the thought of sticking myself in order to obtain blood for testing. I forgot about the glucose kit for a few weeks, and tried it again. I couldn't get it to work. I had another panic attack and put it away again.
Writing and printing manuals is a cost. Accounts doesn't like things that cost money.
Manual writing is done at a separate site from product development or manufacturing, maybe even in a different country. The writers have no access to any of the development documentation. If they need pictures they mail someone, if they're lucky that person actually has contact with development or manufacturing. They don't have access to any software that is able to read the design documents. So what they get and use is a 640x480 screenshot, JPEG-compressed or maybe a photo of the screen someone took with their smartphone. If they're lucky they find a Powerpoint presentation related to the project on a corporate public drive they can rip some images from.
They have an allowance of four pages to fit everything in all languages on and they have to fit the legally-mandated warnings on those too. Oh, and they are only paid for two hours of work on it. Therefore everything except the quickstart basics has to be cut.
Lifehack: Of you only use pictures you save the costs of translation!
And then everything gets sent of to the cheapest printer available and the printed manuals get shipped directly to packaging and shipping directly from the printer without anyone looking at them.
Some of those can be bad. I personally get depressed real quick if I can't find my specific issue in the index, and that happens a lot.
O'Reilly books are sometimes a bit better IMO and some of them are made available to public libraries electronically in like a "streaming" format that you can browse. But the indexing system of these "e-book" versions is terrible.
Google Books (in the "Play Store") lets you look at stuff for free but no accessible index unless you actually buy the item. On the wider internet they maybe show a limited number of scattered highlights from throughout the book, but not in the Play Store.
Recently I found out that some of this stuff plays a bit better on my Android tablet but again - big issues with the indexing, I have found. As in, it is non-existent!
A big one for me is when they run the original material through a cheap OCR and (maybe) some sort of thesaurus - the result is usually stuff like all of a sudden "Bill Woman" is one of the guitarists for the Rolling Stones, sort of thing. (It's supposed to be "Wyman".)
My favorite is the attempts at getting it right via some look-up system. So in a "e-reprint" of something like a Len Deighton title there may be a reference to something you might find in the average kitchen - or - it is an obscure military term in German... and the computer guesses wrong and we're making sausages. Since I grew up in a family that spoke German (they were interned there after WW2) I sometimes "catch" these silly errors but they can be so glaring!
Another example: I think (I'm not 100% sure) that for the longest time Ray Bradbury ("Fahrenheit 451") resisted all pressure to publish in e-formats, and after he passed away there was a rush to the cell phone and Kindle market, with predicably sloppy results.
My recent favorite (not) was an English translation of a Russian book about the Chernobyl disaster, and the publishing "powers that be" ran it through the OCR. So at the part where it's fifteen seconds to go to the explosion and the technicians are scrambling to do something, the author recaps a list of who is present and what they are doing at that moment. At this point the OCR sees a second mention of one of the guys and, for whatever reason, it trips on the original Cyrillic and spells the name differently! So for me the reader, there is suddenly a new guy in the Control Room... where'd he come from???!!! Of course this means my reading comes to a halt with the clock frozen at three seconds to midnight, and you can forget any attempts at an accessible e-index!
Gee thanks, Google, Knopf, Harper & Row, SAMS, Viking, Vintage, Playboy Press and all the rest of them.