Nobody Reads the Guide, Including Me

Every piece of flat-pack furniture comes with an instruction booklet, and by step four everyone is holding a leftover screw and guessing anyway. I don't know a single person who has read one start to finish before starting.

We had an onboarding guide for the product. Forty-something pages, everything a new customer needed. Support kept fielding the same five questions, all answered on page twelve.

For about two years my answer to that was some version of "it's in the guide." I said it on calls. I said it to my own team when they asked why customers weren't finding the answer themselves. I wasn't rude about it, I just believed it, and believing it meant we never once looked hard at the guide itself — we looked at the customer. That's the part I'm not proud of. It's a lot easier to conclude people don't read than to conclude you wrote something nobody could use.

What finally moved me was a design idea, not a support metric — the observation that a door needing a printed sign telling you to push or pull is a badly designed door, not a badly behaved person. The sign is the design admitting defeat. Once I heard it put that way I couldn't unsee it in our own onboarding. Nobody reads isn't a character flaw in the customer. It's information about the product.

So we rebuilt it around what people actually do when they open an account for the first time — click through fast, skip text, try things and see what breaks — instead of what we wished they'd do. The guide is still there. It's a third the length. Support volume on those five questions dropped, though not to zero, and I still catch myself mid-call wanting to say "did you read the guide" before I stop myself.

What I don't know is whether some amount of not-reading is just permanent, a fact about people rather than a design problem, and no guide fixes it past a certain point. I'd been treating every unread page as evidence I hadn't tried hard enough. I'm not sure that's fully true either.

For anyone running onboarding who still believes a good enough guide gets read — what convinced you it does?