A Terribly Unscientific Poll...

I’m deep in the throes of wrestling the UI for our next product in to submission, and I was kind of curious about something. I know there are basically two schools of thought viz. the user interface of a plug-in, as far as consumers go. There’s the “hardware look” guys who want every plug-in to look like an 1176 exact, and the “Starship Enterprise” guys who think that anything that appears on a computer screen should look like Hello Kitty’s toilet paper, except with animation.

That would, of course, be a gross generalization, but before we wade in to it, let me say this much: the user interface informs the use of the device, no matter what it is. Especially when you get in to the territory of stuff that doesn’t exist in hardware. The UI and the DSP code are symbiotic, and one is essentially pointless without the other. This might not seem obvious at first pale (a well-coded 1176 clone will work just as well with the generic slider interface as with the photo-realistic rendering) but it is a fact. The UI sells the plug-in, more than anything else, and the sales provide a comfort zone in which R&D can occur, and the R&D births better DSP code.

In any event, I personally am comfortable with any UI, whether it have fake knobs or space-age OpenGL 3D sliders, as long as it is logically laid out. Nothing against the designers in question, but in my opinion this and this are both glaring examples of how trying to be all things to all people results in a UI of such ridiculous complexity as to actually hinder someone’s workflow. The one-knob-one-function design ethos gets terribly overbearing when you consider that most people step through the presets until they find one they like, and maybe touch up the filter frequency a bit afterwards.

Obviously, each effect needs certain controls to be useful, and I won’t argue that point at all, but our last release (Vapor) could easily have had 20 controls or more, if we made each possible data point in the algorithms accessible to the user. But it really wouldn’t change what is useful about the plug-in, or how it will be used and in what context. It would certainly look more impressive, but ultimately, well, you know…

I am rambling a bit due to the excellent medication my dentist gave me today, but what I’m trying to learn is this: in a plug-in that has a certain complexity level which requires a couple dozen controls, do you prefer the immediately obvious, but somewhat overbearing and anachronistic hardware look, or the not-obvious-at-first-glance, but somewhat more apropos-to-the-context “Starship Enterprise” vibe? If you’re gonna answer, try to explain your reasoning and put it in some sort of context, rather than just posting “hardware” or “Hello Kitty.” I already know how the percentages will split.