I don’t drink coffee. But I do love playing with gadgets. So when we got a fancy new coffee machine at the office, I begged my co-workers to let me make them drinks.

I’d never used one of these machines before, so I looked to the instruction guide posted on the wall. Here’s a picture of it:

Like many instruction guides, this guide is less helpful than it could be. To identify some of the places where this guide falls short, let’s go through these steps one-by-one.

Step 1. Select T-Disc.

I can figure out that a “T-Disc” is one of the little pods for the machine, but it’s annoying that they had to come up with their own name for it. This practice of giving a special name to every part of your product or service often results in customers not understanding what you’re talking about.

I need to pick the “T-Discs” for the cappuccino I want to make, so I check the Recipes part of the guide. This is what I think is really cool about the machine—you can mix and match pods to get different drinks, and the guide provides a few “recipes” for these drinks.

Step 2. Place cup on stand, adjust height if necessary.

I’m just going to ignore that comma splice. Won’t even mention it.

I now wonder if it matters what size cup I use. After all, hot liquids are about to come shooting out of the machine, and I’d hate to have them overflow because the cup was too small. Since there’s no mention of cup size, I just go with the standard paper cups we have and hope that will be ok (it wasn’t).

Step 3. Lift brew dome.

No problem.

Step 4. Insert T-Disc with the BARCODE FACING DOWN. Close the brew dome & wait for blue button to light up.

I wish it wouldn’t yell at me. But again, this is an easy one to do. I start with the espresso pod, since it looks like you can only use one pod at a time, and it’s not clear if the order matters.

Step 5. Press blue START button and follow instructions on screen.

Things start out pleasantly enough:

The machine tells me to insert my “T-Disc” in the machine and close the handle. I press the button, and the drink brews and comes out the nozzle.

Now here’s where it gets confusing. The screen gives me this message:

My drink is “ready for a larger drink?” This sentence has baffled many in the office. And now I need to touch and hold the button again? Why?

I then realized the issue was missing punctuation. This message ought to say: “Your drink is ready. For a larger drink, touch and hold the button.” That’s an important period there. Note that if you are making one of the recipes, you do not want a “larger drink.” Even though the amount of espresso that comes out looks tiny, the cappuccino disk will produce a lot more, and your drink will overflow. Too bad there’s no warning about this.

There was no further instruction about what I should do to make one of the recipes, so I went ahead and put the next pod in and went through the same steps. I am told that this resulted in a drinkable cappuccino.

In the end, there are two main problems with the machine and its documentation:

Full instructions are not given on the poster. It would have been nice to know that there were options for drink size and strength. I might have used a bigger cup, for one thing. I also would have liked to know what exactly you have to do to make one of their little recipes. If you’re going to give people instructions for doing something, you should explain the entire process.

The language in the instructions is not clear. Clarity should always come first.

I understand that I’m nit-picking. After a few tries (maybe), anybody with reasonable intelligence can figure out how to use the machine. But why make it any harder for your users than you have to? Instructions affect how people view your product and your company, so why not do them right?

Sarah Negugogor is a senior information architect for the Siegel+Gale New York office.