What makes a good instruction?

Over the last few weeks I have been doing a bit of work on product instructions, and I can tell you it can be a bit of a minefield. I have worked on instructions for different products, and had different design briefs for the instructions too.

Conversations can go something like this:

1-"We need a new instruction - people keep calling to say that it doesn't have enough images, and too many words."

2-"OK, let's go for a nice big picture showing how everything goes together, we'll get rid of the text so people aren't confused by it."

So an instruction is made with a big picture and very little text, and then people call to complain that there isn't enough text!

There are examples of really bad instructions, like this for a frying pan lid, and sometimes the meaning isn't quite right, like this bin, but quite often there is a case of different people take in information in different ways.

Here at valuetvbrackets we are trying to help with our instruction videos. Here's one for our TV stand, it's not too tricky but this makes it really clear.

The TV brackets are harder, but the videos, like this one for the PL6000 37-50 TVs definitely make things a bit easier.

Are the any examples of good or bad instructions that you've come across? What makes a good instruction in your opinion? Let me know.