Looking cool VS usable GUIs

[JerGoertz]

[concealed identity]

I love Variety of Sound plugins, but their NastyDLA has the most frustrating UI for me. The knob position is marked by a tiny white dot, on knobs that also have light reflections and black to white gradients. Some of their other plugins like Reverb 4 have great UIs, so it's a shame that such a good plugin got stuck with this.

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[mi-os]

NastyDLA is by Variety of Sound, not TAL.

[rod_zero]

Valhalla, Sean sticks to principles laid out by the Bau Haus school of design and over it he follows NASA UI guidelines which were made with actual experiments and tests. IMHO if you don't like Valhalla GUI you are a hopeless romantic for skeumorphism who can't get past that anachronism.

Most developers use skeumorphic GUI because that's what drives sales, the more realistic the more people think it is legit, specially for guitarists it seems. They put very little thought into usability, small controls, small fonts, no way to show hierarchy and so on.

Some as u-he try to get some balance with skeumorphic controls but not including useless elements and not constraining the design because of it. And when the plugin is not emulating hardware as Hive, Filterscape he drops the skeumorphism and goes for a more practical and pretty approach, I remember his knobs in Zebra 2 where they increased in size with the value, that was a good touch, but I suspect he started to realize skeumorphic design sells more and left some of those concepts behind, for example Bazille is quite skeumorhpic for a synth with no parallel in hardware and I find the controls uncomfortable to use.

Then there is Fabfilter who designs for the computer and mouse, some of their last offerings as Timesless 3 have gone a bit into eye candy territory for the sake of it, but historically they have been excellent showing the path forward in GUI design. They have been very influential and many developers have adopted elements.

The GUI is a very important part of a plugin and it can make it a joy to use or a chore, and I am totally avoiding to work with tools that make it hard just to learn it. It also shows where developers put their priorities: usability vs looks, I even wonder if they spend more time and money making a new GUI to resell old algorithms and people just fall into their marketing.

[concealed identity]

NastyDLA is by Variety of Sound, not TAL.

No idea how I mixed that up, I think it's because they've both developed my favorite free plugins for years, and Variety of Sound is abbreviated as "VOS" in SlickEQ. Fixed! (and sorry TAL!)

[DNAudio]

It also shows where developers put their priorities: usability vs looks, I even wonder if they spend more time and money making a new GUI to resell old algorithms and people just fall into their marketing.

The best plugins prioritize function over aesthetics, and it's more common for those hi-res lifelike analog UIs to sound awful. DMGAudio's UIs look straight out of the 90's yet TrackComp is among the nicest sounding analog emulations out there. I honestly love DMGAudio's UI style. It blends well with my DAW, Renoise.
There are exceptions of course. Personally I think Pulsar plugins sound great even if the UIs could be greatly improved by cutting down on the fluff and "authenticity."
Polyverse makes "flashy" UIs but the ergonomics are actually quite good. I like how they look, but there's definitely gonna be people who disagree. Auburn sounds is in the same boat.

[cryophonik]

If you use Logic, you have the option of switching between "Controls" view (controls only on a grey background) and "Editor" view (original plugin GUI). I rarely use the Controls view, but it seems like a solution for unusable GUIs. I believe a few other DAWs have the same/similar functionality.

[paramita123]

Most developers use skeumorphic GUI

Thank you for your very interesting post. I had never heard of that word so Googled it, allow me to correct the spelling : skeuomorphic, the definition being digital design with a resemblance to real-world objects.

We are lucky there are many choices between Airwindows and Acustica Audio.
Unfortunately for the guitar world which started my post, some of the best plugins that I love using have fairly poor GUI and UX. I'm going to gather more design thoughts and send them feedback and requests hoping that helps them develop a new update.

[MrJubbly]

Kilohearts may be one of the best developers around for modern minimalist GUI designs. Their plugins barely waste a pixel of screen space and have an extremely efficient workflow.

[multree]

to me... a good look is more important than screen space usage. is it more important than sound? no... but it's also not less important. I couldn't care less about wasted screen space though as long as the plug-ins are resizable

[paramita123]

to me... a good look is more important than screen space usage. is it more important than sound? no... but it's also not less important. I couldn't care less about wasted screen space though as long as the plug-ins are resizable

I agree with you, and like nice looking plugins too. My original complaint is less about the screen size and look, more about the issues when there are more efforts on looks than on actual usability, eg small fonts and knobs.
Also the issues of making digital software look like hardware to be more credible, therefore limiting the convenience of what good modern UIs can and should do. I plead for a decent compromise, or ideally options for the users to choose what UI they'd prefer to work with.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

You can make a good UI with knobs, great even, but a pet peeve of mine is that knobs are on hardware for a reason whilst almost every digital UI outside of the audio world uses sliders. Sliders make more sense as you don't "rotate" your mouse like a knob and (thankfully) knobs where you drag in a circular motion died out.

Knobs are actually very useful in software, also. A fader with a decent 'throw' takes up quite a bit of space compared to a knob with similar range.

[SebAV]

Although not an FX, I think Korg miniKORG 700s illustrates how bad a skeuomrphism design can be in its « 3D » view when its « 2D » view is quite great

[Ah_Dziz]

I generally don't care what a plugin looks like unless it has gone out of the way to "look crazy and cool and futuristic". Even when things are kinda dumb, (absynth for instance or the zynaptiq plugins) if they do what they do well I'm perfectly happy to use it. It takes a whole lot of terrible design for me to not use a useful tool.

[jancivil]

unless a use case is very, very simple I'm liable to automate every parameter I'll use right off the bat. I don't frequently look at plugins unless I'm "let's watch it go!" like an idiot. I'm not, nor am I likely to be using something really ugly, because I don't like ugly.

I don't find IK Amplitube ugly (or cute) per se, but this is one thing I do assign automation to immediately. I agree its GUI is crap, but when I was using it I guess I liked to get out of there fast LOL.