IMO Canon can take some lessons from Sony in menu design. Canon menus are terrible and awkward to use, while Sony menus are second nature.
I could be wrong, but I'm assuming the above is sarcastic. No offense if it was not meant to be. To each their own. I figured I'd comment on some recent experiences...
I've had an abject lesson in menu system design over the past 18 months. I've been primarily using three different systems serially due to various circumstances. I came originally from Canon, so I had most familiarity (bias?) with that. The short version:
- Panasonic was slightly better than Canon. This was with the S1r, their more modern take on it. Took me 2 days to be as proficient with menus as with Canon. 3rd day, it was easier.
- Sony was disastrous. Spent more than a year with it and am still shooting it some. Periodic "treasure hunts" to not only find where a feature is hidden, but then also sometimes a debugging to figure out which feature needs to be set differently to allow another feature to do what you need. Panasonic was best at addressing this, as they'd have a pop-up tell you exactly why you couldn't do x with y feature at the moment, until you changed that other setting. It was the most disciplined. The Sony "My menu" feature helps for 70 percent of things, but the other 30 percent are maddening. It was a testament to Sony's superiority for my purposes (high res and tracking) that its menus were tolerated.
- Canon is quite reliably organized and deliberately simplified. It's hard to tell that this has been done unless you've done interface work yourself. It is a simpler menu system, but could use another layer of tabs once the screen resolution allows it.
I attribute Panasonic's superiority to the fact that they adapted the higher pixel EVFs and screens first, and when they developed that S1R menu system, they added a layer of tabs, so you have two meta layers of organization, versus one. They had the screen space, and the other manufacturers, like Canon, did not. Also, their helpful notes for each feature that is grayed out reduces much frustration.
Sony still hasn't hired someone with decision-making power to design menus around user functionality versus an organization of technical capacity. Here's the hint when you buy a new product: If the manual reads as an organized list of functions you see in the menus, the system was likely designed and documented by someone hired by the engineers to adequately describe the features. If the manual is organized by user objective, showing the little processes needed to accomplish the most important objectives a user might have, then that is lightly designed and documented by people hired for the purpose.
I'm back in the Canon R camp now, and the menus are one of the advantages.