There's a small test we run on everything before it goes in the shop. Hand it to someone who has never seen it, say nothing, and watch.
If they have to ask a question, something has gone wrong.
It sounds like a low bar. It isn't. Most household gadgets fail it. A pairing sequence. A three-second hold for one mode and a five-second hold for another. A blinking light whose meaning lives on page eleven. Every one of those is a small tax, paid by you, forever, so that a spec sheet could grow one line longer.
The manual is where that tax gets written down.
We think about this in terms of what a thing asks of you before it does anything for you. A soap dispenser that needs no instruction isn't a modest product — it's a product that has decided what it's for. You put your hand under it. Soap arrives, in about a quarter of a second. There are four dose levels, and you'll probably set them once and never think about them again. That's the point of having them. The sensor dispenser is the whole argument in one object.
The opposite case is just as instructive. The hand-crank flashlight has no app, no pairing, no firmware. You turn the crank and it makes light. It comes from a design lineage that predates the temptation to add anything, and it works in a power cut precisely because nobody asked it to be clever.
The two aren't the same kind of object at all. One is a sensor and a battery; the other is a crank and a bulb. But they pass the same test: the first thirty seconds require nothing of you.
We're not against complexity. Some jobs are complicated and the tool has to be. But complexity should live inside the object — in the engineering — rather than out on the surface, in your attention. A good sensor is intricate. Using it shouldn't be.
So: the manual stays in the box. Not because we skipped writing one. It's in there, with the specifications and the certifications and the things genuinely worth checking. But if the day you unbox something is the day you have to sit down and read it, we picked the wrong thing to sell you.
That's the standard. It's quieter than a feature list, and much harder to fake.