I have a really hard time understanding people that don’t get how to assemble furniture of that kind in general.

Instructions or no instructions, there’s only so many ways you can put a bunch of planks together.

I know these people. They aren’t stupid. Many of them just aren’t good at visualizing things they haven’t done or been shown before.

They may know X should go into Y but the task is so unfamiliar or counter to how they think that they hit their working memory limit before it makes sense to them.

Impatience just makes that worse.

IKEA’s instructions are extremely helpful in this case.

Probably poor spacial reasoning skills. Didn’t spend enough time playing with Lego or sticking wood blocks through shaped holes.

I'm with you -- I've assembled a lot of random stuff recently and I wish everyone had instructions half as good as IKEA's.

Yeah, I’m not particularly handy (I break out in a cold sweat whenever anything requires more than trivial assembly), but I’ve never had any issue with assembling Ikea stuff.