Rough Rider 2

[dangayle]

I think anyone critical of this GUI probably has to be equally (if not more) critical of Valhalla DSP's GUIs. But, Valhalla DSP seems to be revered, and most seem pretty hush-hush about the minimalist GUI. When I used RR2, I found it just as functional as any other compressor. I would be nice to have a better gain reduction meter, yeah. But it was just like any other plugin, really. You move the knobs, it does stuff. How it looks is beside the point to me, personally.

I am critical of Valhalla's GUIs, because beauty does play a part in usability:

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design_at.html
In pleasant, positive situations, people are much more likely to be tolerant of minor difficulties and irrelevancies. In other words, although poor design is never excusable, when people are in a relaxed situation, the pleasant, pleasurable aspects of the design will make them more tolerant of difficulties and problems in the interface.

Additionally, having every control look exactly the same can in fact impair usability by increasing the cognitive load necessary to use the plugin. Every time you look at it, your brain has to do a quick scan of everything to make sure you're in the right spot.

[BRBWaffles]

I am critical of Valhalla's GUIs, because beauty does play a part in usability:

Additionally, having every control look exactly the same can in fact impair usability by increasing the cognitive load necessary to use the plugin. Every time you look at it, your brain has to do a quick scan of everything to make sure you're in the right spot.

Oh, give me a break. Yes, let's make all plugin parameters identifiable with a rainbow of colours. Maybe even shapes, too. Would your cognitive load be alleviated if your knobs and dials had some pink triangles or orange squares? Would you like a sucker and a juicebox, too? "Cognitive load", haha. It's called reading the labels, getting used to a new tool, and stop acting entitled.

Beauty also plays no part in usability. Usability is defined by ease of use, not by aesthetic quality. I've seen plenty of artistically masterful plugins that were completely unusable on the basis of their aesthetic quality (Waves' Butch Vig Vocals ). I think you're confusing "usability" with "satisfaction". It sure isn't satisfying to use plugins with minimalist GUIs, but they certainly are easy to use. In this case you read the label and you turn the knob. GUIs literally don't get more fool-proof than this.

[dangayle]

I am critical of Valhalla's GUIs, because beauty does play a part in usability:

Additionally, having every control look exactly the same can in fact impair usability by increasing the cognitive load necessary to use the plugin. Every time you look at it, your brain has to do a quick scan of everything to make sure you're in the right spot.

Oh, give me a break. Yes, let's make all plugin parameters identifiable with a rainbow of colours. Maybe even shapes, too. Would your cognitive load be alleviated if your knobs and dials had some pink triangles or orange squares? Would you like a sucker and a juicebox, too? "Cognitive load", haha. It's called reading the labels, getting used to a new tool, and stop acting entitled.

Beauty also plays no part in usability. Usability is defined by ease of use, not by aesthetic quality. I've seen plenty of artistically masterful plugins that were completely unusable on the basis of their aesthetic quality (Waves' Butch Vig Vocals ). I think you're confusing "usability" with "satisfaction". It sure isn't satisfying to use plugins with minimalist GUIs, but they certainly are easy to use. In this case you read the label and you turn the knob. GUIs literally don't get more fool-proof than this.

The link between aesthetics and usability is no secret, even a cursory Google search pulls up a lot of research into what's known as the Aesthetic Usability Effect

As to your straw man arguments about rainbow colors or Butch Vig Vocals, I'm not an advocate for over the top visuals, they're unnecessary and CPU wasteful. Something can be entirely simple yet beautiful or it can be entirely simple and bland. I find Rough Rider 2 to be bland. I think the Valhalla plugins are less bland, but they could provide a better user experience without going overboard.

[BRBWaffles]

The link between aesthetics and usability is no secret, even a cursory Google search pulls up a lot of research into what's known as the Aesthetic Usability Effect

I read the entire thing. Not once is an actual detraction from usability established as a function of aesthetic quality. There is only a poor measurement of perceived usability from self-reported data. I also read the abstracts from the citations, and this is just really poor science. Like, bottom of the barrel pseudoscience that only social/consumer psychologists could have cooked up. One paper just straight up made up terminology, haha. "Imagers vs verbalizers". It's actually "visualizers vs verbalizers" among consumer psychologists. But, consistency and coherence don't typically occupy the top of any consumer psychologist's list of priorities. Next time you want to school me with science, don't choose "science" originating from a discipline that is occupied almost entirely by quacks and careerists.

Also, I satirized your position. I didn't make a straw man. It's called a joke. I don't think the GUI matters one damn bit to the vast majority of actual professionals. Reaper users have been getting along just fine without GUIs on their plugins for, like, a decade. Personally, it seems like you just enjoy whining.

[dangayle]

Personally, it seems like you just enjoy whining.

I can see you're more interested in personal attacks than actually addressing the issue. That's fine. It doesn't change the fact that I actually love the Valhalla plugins, although I think their interface is their weakest point, and think Rough Rider is a perfectly fine compressor with a bland GUI that makes me certain that I'll never use it.

I'll leave you with this this famous quote from Joel Spolsky about usability vs user experience:

“Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

[cron]

I'm not really sure what other people are seeing with this GUI.

It's a really nice example of slick simplicity to my eyes. I'd rather have make-up and mix to the right of the big knob with the rest of the parameters to the left, but I guess keeping the controls grouped in that way was sacrificed to keep the big gain reduction knob in the middle. So yeah, it could be improved, but the essence of the design in terms of pure aesthetics is really nice to my eyes.

I appreciate it's different strokes for different folks and all that, but I'm really not understanding the other side here in the way that I would with, say, Waves' Butch Vig Vocals plug.

[cron]

“Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

I cannot get down with this quote at all. Firstly an engineer would never make a nightclub brightly lit and quiet because they understand that form follows function, and secondly there's nothing charming about shitty venues to people who actually go clubbing - they're just shitty venues. If you ask any clubber in London what the worst London venue is, they'll likely say either XOYO or Studio Spaces precisely because there's nowhere to sit down and the toilets are awful.

[annode]

My v.1.xx gui is fine. I prefer that to this one anyday.
I choose RR as I would choose a no-control brick wall limiter...when I'm setting up a 'Chainer' project from start, choosing instruments and effects more or less randomly and I want to compress something hard knee but don't want to get involved with it at this time. I'll keep it in the project if it turns out to be bombastic and I like it that way.

[BRBWaffles]

“Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

Y'know, I had a whole paragraph here explaining exactly why that quote is incoherent. But, then I realized that the quote has nothing to do with your argument at all. The quote isn't relevant. Nobody is boycotting plugins because they're not pretty enough. Plugins don't seem to suffer a loss of functionality as a function of poor aesthetic quality. They may suffer as a function of unnecessary convolution, but that is largely independent of aesthetic quality, as I stated earlier.

Your argument is ultimately predicated (whether you know it or not) on the notion that reducing the form of an interface below a (unspecified) baseline threshold for aesthetics will all of the sudden make us worse at our jobs. You base this conclusion on the assumption that plugins with poor aesthetic quality make you think harder, and thus reduce your productivity. That's just completely absurd, and makes way too many assumptions. That's certainly not a straw man, either. That is a complete and clear unpacking of your position. The references you gave to back this position up were studies that measured the ease-of-use of culture-specific interfaces as opposed to generic interfaces. I can't see how this supports your position at all, unless you're saying that Audio Damage should tailor a version of RR2 toward every world culture's aesthetic standards. It's completely untenable, and I don't think you intended to make that case. I think you just threw the first Google search result at me without reading it and hoped I wasn't going to read it either.

Like I said earlier, that science you cited was bloody terrible, and like all bad scientists they inferred causality when they absolutely couldn't. Because both you and those studies conflate aesthetic quality with aesthetic familiarity. Someone only familiar with plugins using nothing but sliders as an interface might look at a beautifully crafted plugin like Pro-R and be pretty confused. However, someone only familiar with Fabfilter's unique aesthetics might look at a ReaPlug and be pretty confused themselves. It's relative. There's no linear relationship between being pretty and being easy to use. "I'm not used to this aesthetic, therefore the aesthetic is bad". No wonder you have issues with cognitive overload. If that was the upper range of my capacity to reason, I'd have an aneurysm every time I tied my shoes.

The plugin is fine. If using RR2 is going to impart such a profound "cognitive load" upon you that you actually become worse at your job for having used it, I'd say that is an issue with you and not the plugin.

[Ichad.c]

Had a good chuckle in this thread:

Client asks Mix Engineer: "The drum mix sounds a bit muddy, can you do anything about it?"

Mix Engineer replies: "Well as you know, my compressor is purple, therefore I can't use it properly, if they changed it to orange -> the drums will sound much better"

Moral of the story: If you don't like it don't buy it. Or as in this case - don't use it if it doesn't work with your "cognitive" flow. It ain't rocket science

[HunterKiller]

Additionally, having every control look exactly the same can in fact impair usability by increasing the cognitive load necessary to use the plugin. Every time you look at it, your brain has to do a quick scan of everything to make sure you're in the right spot.

The link between aesthetics and usability is no secret, even a cursory Google search pulls up a lot of research into what's known as the Aesthetic Usability Effect

+ Infinity

[Ichad.c]

So nobody here has the mental capacity to work on a console like this?

[VariKusBrainZ]

So nobody here has the mental capacity to work on a console like this?

That doesn't operate in 2D environment smaller than most bathroom windows

[BRBWaffles]

So nobody here has the mental capacity to work on a console like this?

That doesn't operate in 2D environment smaller than most bathroom windows

The pan knobs don't have pink triangles on them, so good luck trying to use it.

The whole "cognitive load" argument is just so silly. Like, if you can say that cognitive load impedes productivity, then I can say that pivoting your head and rolling your chair from one end of the desk console to the other impedes productivity. Walking across the room to tweak a knob on an outboard unit impedes productivity. Walking to the closet to fetch a cable impedes productivity. Yes, your workflow would be much more efficient if everything you could possibly need, or need to adjust, either materialized before your eyes or was perfectly ascertainable at the quickest possible glance. However, the world doesn't work that way.

Like, it's clear this dude probably doesn't use freeware synths. Something like this would likely burst a blood vessel in his brain:

[Ichad.c]

Like, it's clear this dude probably doesn't use freeware synths. Something like this would likely burst a blood vessel in his brain:

That synth has at least readouts of the actual values in Hz and ms, imagine it had normalized values like 0-1 or 0-127. His head will probably explode because he has to use his ears to know what it does.

I don't know if I should laugh or cry about about the state of laziness, arrogance and sense of entitlement the world is in these days. I mean - it's a free plugin, somebody actually spent time working on that and you can't spend 2 seconds to read a label, lol, you must be kidding me.

If you're not a beer drinker and you go to a party and someone offers you a beer, you say "no thanks, I'm fine", it's just good manners. You don't go on a social media and accuse the guy of disrupting your "cognitive load" by not offering you a free glass of Bordeaux