Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
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Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#2Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1].
Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism?
Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.)
EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico[2] but not sure if answers my questions.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#3This guy also made a similarly acerbic video about MuseScore, a good open source scorewriter [1]. They actually took his criticisms and started making changes. The two ended up working together and I think he is now the design lead for MuseScore.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#4Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1]. Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism? Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS…
Never heard of dorico because this isn't my space, but that bit is mentioned in the video and it looks as if being greenfield with the original team has its advantages.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#5This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app).
I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly.
Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work.
My own attempt is with Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#6This is an amazingly well done video. I love not only the on-point criticism of the UI but the demonstrations of the suggested improvements really drive the points home.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#7It's ironic that several of the criticisms here are for huge lists of 'engraving' options in hidden menus in Sibelius. Engraving is the equivalent of typesetting (but music obviously doesn't have moveable type). I used a late 90's version of Finale for a long time which I think was originally written for engraving rather than composition. I had to learn to step over the engraving stuff in Finale to get to many of the composition features.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#8This guy also made a similarly acerbic video about MuseScore, a good open source scorewriter [1]. They actually took his criticisms and started making changes. The two ended up working together and I think he is now the design lead for MuseScore. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
great story
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#9This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app). I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively)…
I would hedge that's the majority of the world doesn't learn or doesn't care for Western notation to be fair.
Re: Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]
#10Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1]. Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism? Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS…
Dorico is indeed better, and definitely not a copy of Sibelius UI-wise. Not only was the team starting over with a lot more experience under their belt, but they also had a much better idea of what didn't scale (from a user interface perspective) from the original Sibelius to its current incarnation, which has tons more features.
It's worth pointing out that when Sibelius was first released, it was hugely nicer to use than the industry-leading product at the time (Finale).