Building a Wardrobe

Yesterday I built a new wardrobe for my son. We bought it at IKEA, and for those of you who don't know who IKEA is, it is a Swedish home furnishings store. They have all kinds of furniture and pretty much everything else you need to complete or complement your home.

Anyways, one of the things we were really in need of was a wardrobe for Christopher, as the dresser he had fell apart. Combine a 6 year old boy with a 6 year old poorly designed particleboard dresser, and you have a recipe for disaster. The drawers were always being pulled all the way out, handles mysteriously coming loose, bottoms falling out.

So we bit the bullet and got him something new so that he could be more organized, and wouldn't feel like the girls were always getting stuff and he wasn't.

The directions for the dresser were pretty odd, at least considering the last directions I followed when building something else that wasn't purchased from IKEA. There were no words whatsoever, only pictures of each of the pieces and the numbering to tell you what order to do it in.

I had it done in about an hour.

Compare that to directions you get for lots of other things, where you have massive amounts of text and very few graphics. You may think you are getting your message across by providing all the text, but unless you give clear illustrations that text doesn't always draw everybody in like you think it should.

That is why I feel text only based copy is leaving out quite a few of the new generation when you try to sell. Most of the youth (those under 30 I would say) grew up in a world (American at least) where visuals are key. Whether you have pictures, images, videos, text boxes, testimonials set off to the side, whatever method you use, just make sure you are breaking up the copy to include more graphic elements, and you'll find your response rate going up.