All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren’t the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.
I was a happy MuseScore user before and after the UI changes. So this post brings to mind questions that usually float in my mind:
When I can happily use a thing whose UX is criticized: is it just because I don’t know any better alternatives, or because I’ve spent so long with it that of course I know how to work it? Or is the UX really not that bad? Or is it that there are often general solutions for most of the population, but sometimes some people take really well to things that work poorly for others and vice versa? Is it that the hated parts are bits I do not touch much in my workflow, so of course I see no problems because I am not interacting with the problem parts?
When I have difficulty using a thing whose UX is praised or has no criticism: is it because I am smoothbrained? That I just have not had enough time trying to figure it out, so of course I struggle and just need to apply myself more? Is it something that works for most, but it will not work for everyone? Am I in a really niche use case with bad UX that nobody else has bothered to complain about?
I do not have enough UX knowledge to criticize or make objective evaluations here. I only have how easy it is for me to navigate applications. Though I would like to work on gaining it someday, especially so I can help out FOSS targets of “bad UX” complaints.
I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can’t comment from extensive personal experience.
But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I’m sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.
As a general rule, a good UX should:
Make it very, very easy to do (or discover how to do) the most common basic things, and should result in them being done in the way a user expects
Not slow down a power user from accomplishing basic tasks at speed
Allow easy discovery of and access to less common tasks
A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.
Love tentacrul. I re-watch that video from time to time just because it’s so good. It was also really funny watching a later video of his where he just casually dropped that he was working on musescore.
Omg yes. I actually tried using that after my Fusion360 student license expired and the amount of time it took me just to extrude a basic shape was insane.
You want to make a midplane, a reference plane midway between to parallel planes. You click the Datum Plane button, and then the two parallel planes, and you get a plane that is perpendicular to both, not parallel halftway between. I found it easier to forget how to need midplanes than to get FreeCAD to make one.
There’s some cool concepts in there, I make heavy use of the spreadsheet function, but I swear to every god in every pantheon that Autodesk is paying the FreeCAD development community to keep their UX at least this horrible to preserve their business model. I can’t explain this level of incompetence any other way without relying on rock chewing stupidity.
I love that FreeCAD exists and use it often, but I really hate how much you have to “fight” the UI. I even briefly considered learning OpenSCAD out of frustration with the ui and the toponaming problem (before realizing that switching to OpenSCAD would just shift my frustration onto Javascript fuckery).
Now that the latter is fixed, though, I have just forced myself to forget how to do things the “normal” CAD way (i.e. using patterns and flows that most other software has standardized around) and instead how to do them the FreeCAD way.
I hope at some point we get an overhaul of the UX, but in the meantime I’ll grin and bear it since I have yet to find an even remotely comparable F/OSS CAD software that works the same on both Linux and Windows.
That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it’s hard to go past the Sibelius one if I’m gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.
The conclusion I got from the video was that, while it’s very powerful software, it’s very difficult for new users to start using the program due to unintuitive placement of options. That’s how he, for a lack of better word, reviews each piece of software, from the eyes of a new user.
But on the other hand, the video is also 7 years old at this point so maybe sibbelius has fixed some of the stuff that he pointed out. I don’t really compose music so I honestly wouldn’t know.
Unfortunately Sibelius’s development has basically stagnated since 2012 when the new corporate owners fired the entire original development team, with only one noteworthy release of the core app (not counting side-projects like an iPad app) since then, in 2014.
I first learnt Sibelius on its pre-ribbon interface, which I think was much better (even though I loved the ribbon in MS Office). That certainly made the transfer to more modern versions easier. Still, although Sibelius has a number of specific hangups in its interface that make fairly common activities awkward and unintuitive, I really do think it has the best basic flow. When you’re just in the zone inputting notes, it’s so easy to use in a way MuseScore isn’t.
I actually take some issue with Tantacrul’s design process, because it feels like he fundamentally doesn’t understand how intermediate users like myself use the app. At one point he sent out a survey asking “how many keyboard shortcuts do you use?” in Sibelius/MuseScore etc. The problem was that he didn’t define what a keyboard shortcuts is, and when people asked for his definition, he just snarkily responded that it would be obvious. But it’s not. In Sibelius, you use your left hand on letters A–G to enter the note pitch, and your right hand on the notepad to enter rhythm values and common articulations. Slur lines and some other things can be entered during this process as well (slurs with the letter S).
Does this count as keyboard shortcuts? To me, everything I described above except maybe the slurs is actually the musical equivalent of typing text into a word processor…or a browser text box, like I’m doing right now. Does it become a “keyboard shortcut” just because it can also be done by clicking a rhythm value in a toolbar, and then clicking a location in the staff to choose pitch? I have no idea if Tantacrul thinks so, because he chose snark rather than clarifying.
Incidentally, his MuseScore design replicates this flow, but without the visual reference of the keypad toolbar that lets you learn and easily see what number to press, without requiring sheer memorisation. It’s been a while since I last tried it, but I vaguely recall having other issues with the flow being hard to work out with a keyboard. Great if you’re just slowly mousing around everywhere, but not for the intermediate user trying to get in the zone.
Which is such a shame, because he did such a fantastic job of the other stuff. The user onboarding, score setup, page layout management, etc. The attention to detail even with small things like music fonts and symbol design is impeccable.
Interesting. That would make his survey of rather limited value, in my opinion, because just by doing notes (including rests), durations (just from semiquaver to semibreve, including tie and dot), and accidentals, you get 18, right off the bat. Considering the ranges offered in the poll he made were 1–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20+ (never mind the overlap if you happened to use exactly 5 or 10…), that makes it very hard for anyone who types their note input instead of hunting around slowly with the mouse to get into anything other than the top bucket. Especially since he quite explicitly said “including typical ones (like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc.)”
This is a huge victory, the big takeaway for me is that the person who smack talked the software was willing to get in the room with the designers and help them out.
It’s easy to complain, it’s a lot more work to complain, run through user tests, file bug reports, etc. So bravo to that person, and hopefully we can see this sort of outcome on more software.
The open source music notation software MuseScore used to be really, really bad. A musician and UX designer gave it a scathing review in a humorous YouTube video. And then the company behind MuseScore hired that YouTuber and spent a lot of effort doing a major redesign, and now it’s actually quite good.
All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren’t the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.
I was a happy MuseScore user before and after the UI changes. So this post brings to mind questions that usually float in my mind:
I do not have enough UX knowledge to criticize or make objective evaluations here. I only have how easy it is for me to navigate applications. Though I would like to work on gaining it someday, especially so I can help out FOSS targets of “bad UX” complaints.
I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can’t comment from extensive personal experience.
But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I’m sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.
As a general rule, a good UX should:
A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.
I was prepared to hear the story that the youtuber got sued into oblivion for defamation. Glad to hear they actually worked on improving it instead
Love tentacrul. I re-watch that video from time to time just because it’s so good. It was also really funny watching a later video of his where he just casually dropped that he was working on musescore.
I want him to do FreeCAD.
Omg yes. I actually tried using that after my Fusion360 student license expired and the amount of time it took me just to extrude a basic shape was insane.
You want to make a midplane, a reference plane midway between to parallel planes. You click the Datum Plane button, and then the two parallel planes, and you get a plane that is perpendicular to both, not parallel halftway between. I found it easier to forget how to need midplanes than to get FreeCAD to make one.
There’s some cool concepts in there, I make heavy use of the spreadsheet function, but I swear to every god in every pantheon that Autodesk is paying the FreeCAD development community to keep their UX at least this horrible to preserve their business model. I can’t explain this level of incompetence any other way without relying on rock chewing stupidity.
I love that FreeCAD exists and use it often, but I really hate how much you have to “fight” the UI. I even briefly considered learning OpenSCAD out of frustration with the ui and the toponaming problem (before realizing that switching to OpenSCAD would just shift my frustration onto Javascript fuckery).
Now that the latter is fixed, though, I have just forced myself to forget how to do things the “normal” CAD way (i.e. using patterns and flows that most other software has standardized around) and instead how to do them the FreeCAD way.
I hope at some point we get an overhaul of the UX, but in the meantime I’ll grin and bear it since I have yet to find an even remotely comparable F/OSS CAD software that works the same on both Linux and Windows.
That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it’s hard to go past the Sibelius one if I’m gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.
The conclusion I got from the video was that, while it’s very powerful software, it’s very difficult for new users to start using the program due to unintuitive placement of options. That’s how he, for a lack of better word, reviews each piece of software, from the eyes of a new user.
But on the other hand, the video is also 7 years old at this point so maybe sibbelius has fixed some of the stuff that he pointed out. I don’t really compose music so I honestly wouldn’t know.
Unfortunately Sibelius’s development has basically stagnated since 2012 when the new corporate owners fired the entire original development team, with only one noteworthy release of the core app (not counting side-projects like an iPad app) since then, in 2014.
I first learnt Sibelius on its pre-ribbon interface, which I think was much better (even though I loved the ribbon in MS Office). That certainly made the transfer to more modern versions easier. Still, although Sibelius has a number of specific hangups in its interface that make fairly common activities awkward and unintuitive, I really do think it has the best basic flow. When you’re just in the zone inputting notes, it’s so easy to use in a way MuseScore isn’t.
I actually take some issue with Tantacrul’s design process, because it feels like he fundamentally doesn’t understand how intermediate users like myself use the app. At one point he sent out a survey asking “how many keyboard shortcuts do you use?” in Sibelius/MuseScore etc. The problem was that he didn’t define what a keyboard shortcuts is, and when people asked for his definition, he just snarkily responded that it would be obvious. But it’s not. In Sibelius, you use your left hand on letters A–G to enter the note pitch, and your right hand on the notepad to enter rhythm values and common articulations. Slur lines and some other things can be entered during this process as well (slurs with the letter S).
Does this count as keyboard shortcuts? To me, everything I described above except maybe the slurs is actually the musical equivalent of typing text into a word processor…or a browser text box, like I’m doing right now. Does it become a “keyboard shortcut” just because it can also be done by clicking a rhythm value in a toolbar, and then clicking a location in the staff to choose pitch? I have no idea if Tantacrul thinks so, because he chose snark rather than clarifying.
Incidentally, his MuseScore design replicates this flow, but without the visual reference of the keypad toolbar that lets you learn and easily see what number to press, without requiring sheer memorisation. It’s been a while since I last tried it, but I vaguely recall having other issues with the flow being hard to work out with a keyboard. Great if you’re just slowly mousing around everywhere, but not for the intermediate user trying to get in the zone.
Which is such a shame, because he did such a fantastic job of the other stuff. The user onboarding, score setup, page layout management, etc. The attention to detail even with small things like music fonts and symbol design is impeccable.
I’d say those are keyboard shortcuts.
Interesting. That would make his survey of rather limited value, in my opinion, because just by doing notes (including rests), durations (just from semiquaver to semibreve, including tie and dot), and accidentals, you get 18, right off the bat. Considering the ranges offered in the poll he made were 1–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20+ (never mind the overlap if you happened to use exactly 5 or 10…), that makes it very hard for anyone who types their note input instead of hunting around slowly with the mouse to get into anything other than the top bucket. Especially since he quite explicitly said “including typical ones (like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc.)”
This is a huge victory, the big takeaway for me is that the person who smack talked the software was willing to get in the room with the designers and help them out. It’s easy to complain, it’s a lot more work to complain, run through user tests, file bug reports, etc. So bravo to that person, and hopefully we can see this sort of outcome on more software.
Blender’s UI overhaul from 2.7 to 2.8 was a much needed and very welcome update as well