Tag Archives: visual work instructions

Visual Instructions Example

Visual Instructions

How to get people to actually use instructions for using your product: make it easy to do so. This blog post illustrates a well designed instruction guide for the Seagate FreeAgent backup drive. Simple pictures make it very obvious what to do (and even includes a time stamp showing how long into the process you are – which shows you the total time it will take at one simple glance 1 minute and 36 seconds).

Such instructions are a great example to guide internal standard work instructions.

Related: Why Isn’t Work Standard? – How to Create Visual Work Instructions – blog posts on quality tools – management improvement glossary

Bad Visual Controls – Software

Bad Visual Controls Example: Software via Lean Manufacturing Blog. Funny example. If I had to use it I might use a different adjective.

In the example, the software uses icons that are not obvious. The user has pasted labels on their monitor with text description of each icon. The labels are smaller than the icons.

Some resources for web usability and software usability “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.” (that is pretty hard [impossible actually] to accomplish when the user doesn’t have a clue what will happen).

Visual Work Instructions

Via Got Boondoggle? Shorter Text for Visual Work Instructions (link broken 🙁 so removed) by Steven Blackwell:

The line worker may not even read text that seems excessive. We have spent the last eight years observing line workers using visual work instructions and asking them if they read the text. If the text is a short sentence, the answer is usually “yes.” If the text is more than one sentence long, the answer is usually “no.”

Another recent post, Poka-Yoke Assembly (also prompted by Got Boondoggle?), also discusses the importance of well written (short) instructions.

In writing minimal text, we recommend the sentence structure, “Verb NOUN with NOUN using NOUN.” An example is given in the following illustration, “Cut CABLE to LENGTH as shown using SCISSORS.” That includes 8 words, as opposed to 82 in the original example, only 10% of the original length.