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Let's make a thread of suggestions for better ways to support new users, M transfers, and S users as well as experienced SL users, when these form a sizeable population.  The instruction manual is the traditional path -- it looks elegant, but is a frustrating one-size-fits-all approach.  Videos that address a specific class of user (usually very new) or a specific step (cool video tricks) is better, but takes much longer to view than a well-written online help page.  How about a smartphone app version of the manual, with some improvements in navigation tools, such as a search box? Portable and customizable!  If Leica doesn't have the right skills   :unsure:, I'd pay $9.99 at the app store for a good one.

 

I think the big source of complexity in the SL manual is the unresolved question of which population of initial user is being served.  It's not going to be anyone's first camera, so each user brings a mental picture of how a camera works with them, and that can help or get in the way.  I think M users should be addressed specially, and these need to know (as Wilson has stated) first of all that this is a menu-driven camera, and that you get to things with button presses.  The buttons are unlabelled for a good reason, since they can each do several very different things in the course of normal operations.  S users and experienced SL users (which the rest of us hope to become) don't need this indoctrination, but they need precise tables of where each control setting is found and what side effects they have.  Someone coming from the "many buttons, all customizable" world -- Olympus, Fuji, Sony, CaNikon -- will require a variant of the M user approach, with more information on what buttons can't do everything (because they are the back out or exit buttons?).   Maybe there are shortcuts for explaining things to T and Q users.

 

scott

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