“To me it makes no sense to read any manual front to back. There’s no narrative there; there’s no story. There’s information, facts and suggestions, and I want to go to them as I need them.” So says Lindsay Silverman, senior technical manager at Nikon, in How to (No Kidding) Read Your Camera Manual.
How would Silverman improve the camera manual?
“Here’s what I do. I break it down into categories of information: What do I already know? What do I need to know right now? What do I need to know a lot of the time? What do I need to know some of the time?”
“It’s not a novel,” Silverman said. “It’s a lot of information, and like a manual for any product that involves a degree of technology, a camera manual can be confusing simply because it’s hard to digest in one shot.”
Sound familiar?