Read the Instructions

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 04 Jun 2001 15:00:00 -0700

First there was clothing, and it was good. Then came washers and dryers, which made things better. Then, of course, came washing instructions, and that's where the trouble began.

In 1997, the Federal Trade Commission decreed that garment makers could use symbols instead of words on the laundering tags every new garment has to carry. With their various gradations and shadings, many of these federally approved pictograms are cryptic. A reasonable person would interpret the "do not bleach" symbol, for instance, as meaning "no pyramids allowed!" These elegant pictograms, developed by the insightful folks at the American Society for Testing and Materials, are a triumph of cross-cultural communication - equally incomprehensible to everyone, no matter what your mother tongue.

Language sometimes fails in the same way images do. Who among us hasn't wrestled with incoherent VCR programming instructions or a maddening software manual?

All this is a relatively new problem. Before Cissell Manufacturing introduced the first tumble dryer in 1951, for example, no one needed to know whether or not it was OK to tumble dry that sweater. They had no choice.

But for the last century or so, technology has outpaced our ability to tell one another how to use it. The globalization of production and consumption has only made things worse, requiring product instructions to aspire to a kind of commercial Esperanto that puzzles people from San Francisco to Sweden.

That's no good. Product descriptions, instruction booklets, laundry tags, user manuals and all the other detritus of new technology are the unexplored territory of modern business, the places on the map of commerce where the land seems to peter out and the space is filled with serpents. Seeing no advantage in colonizing this bleak territory, businesses long ago ceded it to a gang of attorneys and functional illiterates who produce materials few people can understand or use.

In a land of plenty where most of what people buy isn't strictly needed, the conventional wisdom is that aspirational ads are more effective selling tools than a well-wrought manual. Yet the essentially mysterious nature of many products makes people wary and actually retards the adoption of new technologies, even if they might be useful. Things we buy that flummox us undermine our faith in our own purchasing decisions and eradicate whatever feel-good glow the advertising may have induced in the first place.

The news is that change is in the wind, and it will come from that unlikeliest of quarters: the very technology that brought us the problem in the first place. Imagine, for example, that clothing carried smart tags containing laundering information in a host of languages. American washers and dryers would read and display the instructions in English, but in Paris they'd appear in French. Dryers might even issue an alarm or refuse to run if they contained an item embedded with a "do not tumble dry" chip. You might not understand the tag, in other words, but your appliances would.

Sure, companies will still sell things by making them seem sexy, but product information in all its unpoetic forms is about to become a source of real competitive advantage. In the future, in fact, products and the information about them will be harder to distinguish - like the laundering instructions that "speak" to your appliances. A product and its manual will increasingly be one, and closely printed product manuals, padded with dire warnings and unintelligible diagrams, may largely retreat to the dusty province of ephemera, where collectors already cherish the tattered remnants of early instructions for sewing machines, typewriters and Brownie cameras.

Manuals got off on the wrong foot. The Torah, an early guide for living, required too much scrolling. The Talmud added a whole new layer of complication (aggravated by the notoriously poor product support offered by God).

And that was about it for a long time. When the industrial revolution brought the fruits of science to the marketplace, it was often assumed that buyers already had a lot of expertise in using whatever device was being sold and didn't need a great deal of documentation. (Even today, most people who consider themselves experts skip the instructions.) It wasn't until technological products started to gain greater currency that more elaborate product information began to come into vogue. The 1908 Sears catalog, for instance, lists an engineer's level for $75 (a large sum in those days) that included instructions, and a darkroom kit came with a little how-to book on photography. In-store information improved as well, first with the introduction of fixed prices in the 1850s - useful information indeed - and then with the introduction of increasingly detailed labeling, stemming from breakthroughs in food-packaging technology and international distribution.

All of this communicating had its roots in the elemental desire of retailers to get customers to buy. To this day, a grim but mysterious affliction known as "decision postponement" haunts the dreams of every merchant. Such shopper "friction" is the main irritant in what is now an otherwise golden age for the average person who buys stuff. Today's cars, for instance, are superior in almost every way to cars on the market a generation ago. Cell phones, DVD players and other consumer electronics, meanwhile, make it possible for the average person to accomplish things even tycoons and kings couldn't dream of a couple of generations ago. It's a little overwhelming. And overwhelmed people don't buy.

Better product information is supposed to solve that problem. Yet until recently, the quality and quantity of product information just hasn't kept pace. Consumer Reports has long filled an essential role in the marketplace by providing objective information unavailable elsewhere. But for the energetic (or the obsessive), the Internet has brought about the biggest change of all, making it possible to find out about almost anything before you buy. Thus, when we built our house, I was able to learn about the properties of particle board versus plywood, and the tendency of two-sided fireplaces to smoke - all by letting my fingers do the surfing. And when it came time to frame the kitchen, I easily checked the dimensions of the new refrigerator we wanted to make sure it would fit.

The Internet is proof that technology can make product information into a huge competitive advantage. Look at Amazon.com; if it succeeds at all (and it deserves some credit simply for failing to fail), its innovative and useful product information has been a major factor. On Amazon you can find out all about a book, including what other readers thought of it, before you buy. It's easy to do, it's in plain English, and it's free.

New-car shoppers increasingly turn to the Net for information about automobiles, and sites such as Edmunds.com and even Yahoo do a superb job of helping users sort through the haze of advertising, accessories and so forth. Better information results in smarter purchasing decisions, which in turn yield better products as competing firms struggle to stay in the game. Talk about a virtuous cycle!

The strip mall is the next frontier. Nowadays shopping tends to occur at low-priced chains where the poorly paid staff is scarce and not especially knowledgeable, and low retail margins make this unlikely to change soon. Inevitably, retailers will turn to technology, if only in pursuit of their traditional holy grail: the highest possible sales per square foot. Consultant Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, notes that teleconferencing and other technological solutions may help retailers achieve the long-term goal of cutting their huge real estate expenses by shrinking their stores. At the same time, this could offer an aging society a return to the neighborhood shop without necessarily sacrificing volume or selection.

Retailers have already taken their own information systems pretty far thanks to networked computers and universal product codes; what remains is to make information available to customers. Is it really such a leap to imagine pointing a handheld device at a bar code or other symbol on a shelf or product and getting a host of information about it? At the very least, you ought to be able to find out whether there are more in stock if the shelf is empty, or which other stores in the chain have them.

But if you're looking at hot-water heaters in Home Depot, why can't you also find out whether the given unit is big enough for your needs, or how much it might cost for a professional to install? Why can't you put an esoteric question to the company's product-support staff? While you're at it, of course, the store might offer you a discount coupon for an insulating blanket or some copper pipe.

Underhill, president of New York-based Envirosell, notes that something like this is already happening in Europe, where, thanks to the Continent's generally more advanced mobile phone systems, some stores make product reviews and the like available via Web-enabled cell phone. Some day, he says, you might be able to confer with an expert on hot-water heaters at the store's headquarters via videoconference.

Some of the technology that retailers are playing with today is less than thrilling. Raymond Burke, the personable business professor who runs the University of Indiana's Customer Interface Lab, notes that retailers are trying to revive the kiosks that have been around for years, this time by making them Web-enabled. One problem, of course, is that "if it works well, you can't get near it." Retailers are also experimenting with handheld shopping devices - Palm-like machines they give you when you walk in - but these have yet to prove their efficacy. "Bluetooth is the great hope here," Burke says. The devices also are great for self-checkout.

Major department stores have already had success with a twist on traditional bridal registration by letting soon-to-be-marrieds roam through their stores with bar-code readers. They can use them to generate a database of desired presents that well-wishers can pick out and pay for.

To prepare for the future, Burke says, retailers are trying to create a standard method of capturing product information, sort of like the standardized nutritional labels on food, that would permit a unified product database accessible online, in stores and so on. The industry has even formed an Association for Retail Technology Standards. One incentive is evidence that better information really does matter. "The more product information you have, the less price sensitive you are," Burke observes, adding that once some of these technological capabilities are in place - and well integrated with the Web - "we'll have to give e-commerce applications a second chance."

By that time maybe you - or your clothes dryer - will be able to understand how to launder the things you buy.

Daniel Akst writes frequently about technology and business. His novel The Webster Chronicle will be published in October.

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Read the Instructions