I’m not a handyman but I’m handy. I can saw without cutting my fingers or hands, hammer without bending nails, and unclog a toilet while holding my breath. So, you’d figure that assembling furniture from Ikea would be a snap.

Wrong.

After swearing off buying anything from Ikea as a rite of passage in becoming a real adult, I succumbed recently in an effort to refurbish the home office without pillaging the corporate bank account. The magic about Ikea is how wonderful they make everything look. You stroll through the showroom and the world seems like your oyster…until you get everything home and suddenly realize it has to be assembled.

So, you unpack all the boxes, pull out parts, which includes lots and lots of little pieces (screws, widgets, etc.) and hunt for the instructions. What’s amazing is the instructions haven’t changed in years; they’re still black and white, no-frills, step-by-step instructions that assume everything is just so easy to follow.

Wrong.

Needless to say, the assembly process is frustrating, time-consuming and a serious threat to relationships if you do it with someone else. And you end up with extra parts, which I’m pretty sure Ikea doesn’t supply as a convenience.

It struck me there are some easy things Ikea could do to make things a lot better and easier. First, it needs to colour-code its instructions and the parts to remove a lot of guess-work that goes into assembling things.

Second, Ikea really, really needs to embrace video. While it’s nice the instructions are online, not having videos that how show how things are put together is a mystery, particularly given we live in a video-centric world. For all the things that Ikea does well, its inability to embrace video is puzzling. Instead, it has a YouTube channel dominated by videos about cooking and food.

Here’s an example of what Ikea should be doing with video.