And a really good tool will anticipate what you're trying to do and make it even easier than you were expecting it to be. ![]() If you know them a good intuitive tool should be able to make them available with as little friction as possible. Of course software is specialised and if you don't know anything about DAWs - or photo editing, or 3D - you're going to have to climb a learning curve.īut domain basics are standard. The principles of good UI design are well known: minimise clicks, minimise pages, minimise the number of entities that users need to remember, avoid multiple access points for features, avoid hidden modes and secret key combinations (unless it's a command-line app, sort of), group related features, concentrate on implementing the most common tasks with as little friction as possible, avoid constant mode switching, avoid long lists of unrelated items, try to handle windows and dialogs intelligently to avoid clutter, make all operations as consistent as possible, follow general OS and industry standards. But someone has at least thought about typical task-based workflows and tried to minimise the number of UI entities and clicks required to perform them. Some features are very intuitive, some are less so. You won't find them unless you read the manual and/or watch a video - if you can find it.Ī lot of people use it, but it's not a model you'd want to copy.Ībleton Live is more of a mix. You can do a lot with it, but it's a mess of accreted features with some bizarre near-duplications, all splattered around almost randomly. You might think that's the same thing as familiarity with existing software, but it really isn't.įor example: Cubase. I think it's about mapping domain knowledge to users tasks with as little friction and unnecessary complication as possible. ![]() ![]() I don't think it's about familiarity at all. (PS: Thank you very much for Ardour, it is a remarkable piece of software.) While you can certainly make pretty things that are impossible to understand, I would tend to argue that there is a bare minimum of prettiness needed to make something that's friendly and engaging. And of course, you can't really get around whether or not a UI is attractive, displaying good colour sense and being visually balanced and such. Being "discoverable" is another thing where you can talk about the balances between having everything right in front of you and a complete information overload. "Internally consistent" is another thing you can talk about and to some extent quantify. I think there are much better words to use to talk about whether a UI is successful or not: "Familiar" is a good word, because then you can ask "familiar to whom" and have a good conversation about what kind of users you have, their backgrounds, how much work you expect them to put into learning your software, etc. I'd also argue that nobody is born with an intuition to work a DAW or any other piece of software, and in that sense I think it's just a misleading term. We moved a few buttons around and changed some font sizes, but the most visible change is the completely new colour palette. ![]() Case in point, we recently did a complete UI make-over at $JOB and the bossman keeps referring to it as the new 'more intuitive UI'. It's an overly broad term that in my experience doesn't tend to lead to very good conversations about what's good or bad. I don't like the word at all when describing interfaces. It’s really a different world from electronic music production, which I’m rather familiar with lol.īasically, if it involves in-the-box synthesis and largely programmatic sequencing it’s a different animal than a multi track audio editor optimized for comping takes.Ībleton workflow makes it clear how they are streamlining features to fit the electrónica (everything is electrónica these days, in terms of the production techniques having been appropriated by everyone else.)Īnd trackers and such are one of the original opinionated platforms expressly for making machine music, as Frooty and it’s ilk like Orion added audio tracks and recording features much later. Note that Harrison mixing consoles funded some of Ardour dev a few years back expressly to use it for their system, adding bespoke plugins etc. Apples pace in pushing you off their hardware is many times faster than the geological timespan of pro studio upgrades. A working recording studio will not change versions, let alone DAWs, given the non significant investment in plugins, time patching routing, probably to a physical patchbay, and hardware controllers or digital mixers that may have firmware compatibility concerns etc.
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