jcboy3 wrote:
User manuals are without exception very poorly written.
I am convinced that cameras are NOT designed with use cases considered.
The time to evaluate usability is well before the testing phase. By then, design decisions are baked into the software/ firmware. I have done projects where the user manual was written as an initial design requirement. And reviewed by users before any user interface software was written.
Cameras are developed by the Japanese, who are notoriously bad at software. And translation to other languages is poor.
I am a user of many different cameras and they each have some good and bad design features, and i think this shows a uniformly poor understanding of efficient operation principles by all of the camera companies.
User manuals are without exception very poorly wri... (
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If you're that negative about product documentation, I can't believe you've ever given it a chance.
Yes, it's often treated as an afterthought. At my company, I was never able to write a manual before software was written or procedures were developed. Our IT staff was Ready? FIRE! (Aim? WTF is aim???). No one told them the human interface comes first! They would send me a beta and duck! I was famous for writing them back 16 pages of bug reports and change requests. I wasn't going to let crappy software reach our customers if I could help it.
Growing up in my parents' household, we had a rule about all new appliances or equipment: We weren't allowed to use it until we had read the manual. It proved to be a great rule. Our "stuff" lasted for decades. I still have a Heathkit shortwave set I built in 1968. It still works. Heathkit manuals were great!
Also in 1968, a family friend loaned me her Canon FX. The manual was written in JEnglish — English badly translated from Japanese — but I made sense of it.
I read the manual twice, loaded a roll of Tri-X, and took it to a school football game. After the game, I souped the film and made some prints. I was hooked!
Reading bad manuals for decades taught me what I needed to write and illustrate good ones.
In the mid-2000s, I was tasked with writing a complete training program curriculum for school portrait photographers who would be using our rigs with Canon EOS 20D bodies, Tamron zooms, and Dell laptops. It was a rather extensive task, also involving documentation of proprietary software, a four-light location studio lighting kit, and fairly rigid procedures for setting it up and working in schools. I had to read the manuals to ALL the equipment, and distill the relevant parts into training materials. Then I had to produce those materials by myself.
The result ultimately included writing and illustrating manuals, producing five hours of DVD video training, and structuring a week-long training plan. We hit the road and trained our reps and photographers all over the country. It worked quite well. We were able to transition our business from film capture to digital capture in a short period of time. Unfortunately, photographic printing of school portraits was a dead man walking, and our business imploded after the confluence of social media, the Internet, computers, tablets, and mobile phones made family photo albums and portrait prints seem silly. Moms want everything on FaceBook, Instagram, and their phones, now.
I implore anyone who thinks manuals are insufferable to go ahead and suffer them. Humor the poor schmucks who write them. They're doing their best to help you get the most from your purchase. They didn't get up that morning and say, "Hello, world. I'm going to write you a sucky manual today!"