Why Your Documentation Feels Like Furniture Assembly Instructions
We have all been there. It is 9:00 PM on a Tuesday. You are sitting on the floor, surrounded by a baffling graveyard of particleboard, wooden dowels, and that specific type of plastic packaging that requires a tactical knife to open. In your hand is a pamphlet. It contains no words, only a series of pictograms featuring a cheerful, gender-neutral cartoon character who seems to exist in a universe where gravity is optional.
You are in the IKEA dimension.
The sensation you are feeling is a distinct cocktail of anxiety, confusion, and the sinking realization that you have just torched three hours of your life. And unfortunately, this feeling isn't confined to assembling Scandinavian bookshelves. It is the exact same emotional texture developers feel when they wade into the swamp of modern technical documentation.
When docs are dense, disorganized, and stripped of context, they aren't helpful guides. They are assembly instructions for a product you don't understand, written in a language you don't speak, by a person who assumes you already know the answer.
We didn't get here because writers are lazy or developers are malicious. We got here because we are accidentally breaking the fundamental rules of how human brains process data. We are drowning our users in unnecessary cognitive load.
The RAM in Your Head
In the 1980s, an educational psychologist named John Sweller figured out that our working memory—the scratchpad our brains use to process what is happening right now—is terrifyingly limited. Think of it like a computer with 4GB of RAM trying to run a modern operating system. If you open too many tabs, the machine doesn't just slow down. It freezes.
Sweller argued that when we learn, we deal with three types of load. First is Intrinsic Load, which is just how hard the subject is. Quantum physics is hard; there is no way around that. Second is Germane Load, which is the good effort your brain makes to build patterns and connect dots. It is the feeling of learning.
Then there is the third type, the villain of our story: Extraneous Load.
This is the mental tax you pay because the information is presented badly. It is the energy you waste decoding a confusing diagram, looking up an acronym the writer didn't define, or navigating a sidebar that looks like a fractal. Bad documentation is a factory for Extraneous Load. It takes the difficult task of learning software and buries it under a landslide of confusing presentation, leaving zero bandwidth for the actual job of understanding.
The Wall and The Jungle
The most common offender is the Wall of Text. You have seen this. It is the documentation page that looks like a terms of service agreement. It is a solid brick of prose with no headings, no breaks, and no mercy. It ignores a basic truth of the internet: people do not read. They scan. They are on a mission to solve a specific error code, and your Wall of Text forces them to read a novel just to find a sentence.
Then there is the Context-Free Diagram. This is the classic "Step 4" of an assembly manual where a piece of wood suddenly appears attached to another piece of wood, but the angle has changed, and you have no idea if you are looking at the top or the bottom. In software, this looks like a code snippet with no preamble. It provides the "what" but completely ignores the "why" and the "how." It fails to orient the user in space. As Cadasio points out, the struggle with assembly instructions is almost always a lack of context. We need the zoom-out before we can handle the zoom-in.
Finally, we have the Jargon Jungle. This is the "Curse of Knowledge" in action. Experts forget what it feels like to be a beginner. They casually toss around terms like "idempotency" or "sharding" or "CI/CD" without stopping to explain them, assuming everyone at the party speaks the same dialect. For a new user, this isn't helpful; it is alienating. It shuts down the learning process because the user has to tab out to Google every third word.
The Fix
We need to stop writing assembly instructions and start giving guided tours.
This means we have to be aggressive about removing Extraneous Load. We have to chunk information into bite-sized pieces. We have to provide context before we dive into the code. We have to build navigation systems that actually work, rather than forcing users to play a game of treasure hunt across twelve browser tabs.
This is a massive amount of work. It requires empathy, time, and a user-centric obsession that is hard to maintain when you are also trying to ship product.
This is why we built Doc Holiday.
We didn't build it because we wanted another SaaS tool. We built it because we were tired of the "IKEA effect" in our own work. We wanted a teammate that could shoulder the cognitive load of writing so we could focus on building. Doc Holiday acts as that translator. It takes the raw, messy reality of your code and structures it into something a human can actually scan. It defines the jargon. It creates the context. It breaks the Wall of Text into a scannable list.
It effectively offloads the Extraneous Load from the reader and the writer.
The next time you find yourself staring at a documentation page, feeling that familiar rise of frustration, remember that it isn't you. It is the format. Good documentation shouldn't feel like a test of your patience. It should feel like a conversation with a smart friend who wants you to win.
