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Sunday, January 20, 2008

Who Wrote This Stupid Manual?

"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?

“Read the article

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