We’re in the middle of another industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 is making the world of manufacturing faster, more digital, and more connected at an unprecedented rate.

Delivering knowledge to your workforce is essential. As jobs in the manufacturing industry become highly digitized and the global supply chain becomes more complex, it's more important than ever to effectively distribute digital work instructions.

Traditional paper work instructions aren’t great. Lengthy, awkward, and hard to produce, a paper instruction manual frequently causes more problems than it solves.

In fact, close to 90% of paper instructions fail to provide a satisfactory solution for their users.

By providing your team with clear and to-the-point digital work instructions, you can expect:

Ultimately, bad work instructions can cost your business billions.

Human errors account for 9 out of 10 incidents in the workplace. Good digital work instructions and standards could prevent these mistakes from happening.

Structure and clarity are key in good work instructions:

Structure is the key to saving time in everything we do - and work instructions are no exception. In order to write digital work instructions (from the company's perspective) and understand the digital work instructions (from the end-user's perspective) we must give them a clear and logical structure. Based on academic research on instructional design and learnability, we've structured our platform in the following way:

This model is a simple visual representation of the key components in our instructional approach:

Every SwipeGuide digital work instruction follows this same format. Having a consistent approach to structure allows our customers to reproduce quality work instructions with minimal effort.

Make sure to check out our blog post for additional tips, tricks, and hacks for making effective digital work instructions . Also, download our "Create Better Work Instructions" eBook:

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a. Structure.

GUIDE.

The basic element of every instruction is the "guide." It might be helpful to imagine the guide as the entire paper booklet for a product - from the first to the last page. It contains every topic, instruction, and step detailing how to effectively complete a set of different tasks in a factory or with a certain machine.

TOPIC.

You can see the topics in a guide as well as the different categories or themes in one guide. For example, all instructions about cleaning machines in factory x can be collected under the topic "Cleaning."

INSTRUCTION.

Instructions are the broader and more basic ideas in the instructional design process. Instructions do not necessarily need to follow a strict chronological order. However, they should cover every element in the most logical progression, from start to finish. In this example, we'll use an existing instruction manual for an industrial machine called the Multipacker OCME. This is a piece of complex equipment used for packing bottles and cans in the beverage manufacturing industry. The goal of the instruction is to successfully prepare the machine for use. The following instructions cover the basic processes needed to accomplish the following goals:

These instructions each contain a certain number of steps.

STEP.

Steps are your opportunity to be more focused and specific. They are part of the larger instruction and provide the information needed to complete it.

While steps are narrower and much more focused than the instructions they describe, they should never be complex in their language and composition.

If you define the steps within a particular instruction, always focus on the same goal: transition the process from its initial state to its desired state.

The instruction we've used as an example represents a very simple goal: prepare the machine for use. It has an initial state, several intermediate states, and a desired end-state.

The steps you define will accomplish this goal. They need to bring the machine from its initial state (unprepared) to its desired state (prepared) in a series of steps. It might read something like this:

Each step is very simple, yet very focused. The steps above complete the task in a series of concise actions.

Following the steps in a digital Instruction is an easy and highly effective way to make sure that users accomplish a goal while learning at their own pace. However, we know that an effective structure for your content yields the best results - in this case real learning and error-free work.

Read the section below to find out how to create the best content possible for your digital work instructions.

b. Content.

VISUALS.

We live and work in a visual context, and this is important to remember when creating effective work instructions. Images are processed by our brains much faster - sixty thousand times faster - than text. Clear visuals are simply the most efficient way to deliver important ideas.

Images also have much less ambiguity than text. An image makes it clear what a situation entails, and what needs to be done. When we combine the efficiency and clarity of visuals with simple text, it is a very powerful way to work and communicate.

But not all visuals are created equal. Visuals are critical to the success of your digital work instructions. However, if they are unclear or poorly executed, they can create more problems than they solve.

Read our blog here for some simple tips to help you make the most out of your visuals .

WORDS.

For the highest level of learnability and clarity, tasks should be described in the active present tense (install, press, click, follow). You should also avoid long sentences, and we recommend breaking down tasks into two or more sub-tasks when the user needs to perform several actions. A maximum of 10-12 steps is recommended for your instructions to be effective. When you want users to memorize a task, you should limit yourself to a maximum of 5-7 steps.

EXTRAS - SAFETY, FIXES, AND TIPS & TRICKS.

It’s important to remember that your end-user will be a human performing work in a potentially dangerous environment. Sometimes, additional information must be added to ensure a safe and effective work environment.

That’s where the practice of Information Mapping comes in handy.

A good digital instruction platform provides a way to include any extra, essential information in a way that is unobtrusive. This can be done with a clickable icon or something similar.

We've outlined the various forms of information mapping that we use when creating digital work instructions in the SwipeGuide platform:

So, how can you create great work instructions?