A UI might not make it easier
6 comments
·March 25, 2025helpfulContrib
We see this, time and again, in the synthesizer world: menu-diving.
Its such a dreadful, awful paradigm - to scroll endlessly through some misguided attempt at 'user interface', only to be deflated and demotivated within minutes.
Its just so un-musical to have to be scrolling through endless blocks of text, only occasionally rewarded with tepid iconography or bleak fonts more appropriate for a dishwasher. Oh, you can only afford two buttons and don't have a GPIO to spare for proper scroll wheels? FUCK YOU. You deserve duct tape and LED-matrix after-thoughts, peon synth purchasers.
Sure, there are plenty who attempt to address the pain - Teenage Engineerings' particularly ridiculous and utterly useless overpriced and irrelevat graphics springs immediately to mind. Arturia's tepid attempts, also. The major players? Forget it, those guys are wedded at the neck to their type systems and rigid frugality. A 240x200 OLED does not a quality, classy experience, make. I'm looking at you, Axel Hartmann - just give up and make a living designing cigarette machines, for fucks sake.
But, as a result, for us synth nerds: its 40 years of dreck and muck. No wonder this world embraces the Eurorack!
Won't someone in the synthesizer world - please, just anyone at this point - take those endless lists of soulless parameters, and wang an utterly creative, truly desirable interface on it - something that not only makes the operator factually musical, but interesting to watch while they're doing it.
(Disclaimer: have tried and failed. Synthesizer designers shouldn't be influenced by bureaucrats and bean-counters - but they always are. We get it - you can't afford to innovate, the BOM is God.)
recursive
I love Nord's UI. Not sure if you would or not. They do have some menus, but most performance-useful functions are assigned to a physical knob or button, sometimes with a shift modifier. It's evident that a ton of thought went into the ergonomics, when I compare it to other keyboards I've played.
helpfulContrib
Oh, there are limits to my tolerance of Shift modifiers, though, and they are small.
Something truly revolutionary, imho, would just be a row of about 32 Mod-wheels, all lined up along the back edge, some screens underneath, and nothing but flashy graphics AND VERY LITTLE TEXT (could even turn off the text with a dedicated key) ..
It'll happen, eventually. Someone will have the balls to abandon the washing machine methods, and just go freaky. It'll have to sound good as well, though ..
recursive
For me, a problem with a general row of undifferentiated controls is it is hard to distinguish between them in a performance context. I like it when the filter cutoff knob (say) is bigger, because then I easily know that's the one I'm going to be twisting.
All of this makes a lot of sense to me, and I'd be super interested to read about some real-world examples of when UIs were made that were actively detrimental to the user experience along with what the better solution was (or what it would have been, if it didn't end up getting put into practice). I get the sense that a lot of the insights might come from seeing the mistakes described happen in practice, so if any of those are possible to write about, it would be awesome to read a blog post building on this one that covers one of those times.