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There's definitely a point about commercial software overfitting on first-use experience as opposed to reaching a higher productivity / usefulness plateau with

by bschne 6y ago

There's definitely a point about commercial software overfitting on first-use experience as opposed to reaching a higher productivity / usefulness plateau with some initial investment. That being said, I would not overly romanticize FOSS' achievements in that arena. The lack of investment beyond merely writing functional code and the lack of opinionated design shows in many FOSS products, beyond the point of it being "geared towards repeat users / experts". A lot of it just has extremely inconsistent interfaces that not only leave visual styling trends but also basic design principles founded upon human perception by the wayside, and that costs everyone, novices and experts. Additionally, there seems to be a bit of resurgence in productivity apps that favor more keyboard-oriented workflows, or at least also think about how people can become faster and more efficient after the initial onboarding.

klodolph 6y ago
> There's definitely a point about commercial software overfitting on first-use experience as opposed to reaching a higher productivity / usefulness plateau with some initial investment. I would say… sure, that may be true for many apps. There are plenty of counterexamples, and I’d say MuseScore’s competitors (Finale, Sibelius, Dorico) are good examples of apps that are not tailored towards first-use experience as much as they are tailored for heavy users. They heavily rely on keyboard shortcuts and are modal (often to the point of being arcane, but UX is hard).
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Have you seen tantacrul's other videos? I'd say besides Dorico they are also relics of that earlier area, like Adobe. Dorico is an interesting case. I'm curious how they were funded. The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    My experience with this software is primarily from using it myself. I don’t know if “relics of that earlier era” is accurate, and I’m not sure what era we’re talking about here. Why do you say that they’re relics of an earlier era? > I'm curious how they were funded. The story of Dorico is pretty simple. Avid bought Sibelius back in 2006 because they needed a good score writing solution—Avid presumably wanted to provide a “complete solution”—but Avid closed the office, and the same team of developers then made Dorico which was bought by Steinberg for presumably the same reasons that Avid bought Sibelius. Take a look at film/TV scoring, which is where a big chunk of the money is for working composers. There are three main DAWs in use: Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic Pro. It makes a ton of sense that you’d want to have a score writing program to sell alongside your DAW, so Avid and Steinberg did that by acquiring existing software. Logic Pro can… sort of… already edit scores. Logic is not nearly on the level of a proper score writing program but it’s still fairly solid and works for composition. > The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated. This doesn’t follow at all. If you’re a freelance composer or transcriber, then even marginal improvements in productivity can more or less be thought of as pay raises or additional free time. If you’re doing a proper TV or film production, then you might have something like 10% of your entire budget set aside for music. Composers aren’t really interchangeable anyway—if you want someone to make a decent score for your TV show, then you can’t find them on Fiverr. My general impression is that when you meet someone who is a professional in a particular field—even if that field is not highly paid—then a $600 business expense that improves productivity is not hard to justify.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  As is true of almost all "creativity" apps. DAWs, video editors, animation tools, paint applications - there are few highly featured examples of this software that do not require a serious learning committment before being comfortable.
  - bschne 6y ago
    Yes, but to me the important difference lies in what proportion of that learning curve is conceptual/inherent in the domain (knowing what 100 filters and their parameters, or 25 different layer blend modes do; Learning what filter you need to apply to get from some initial state to some desired state, etc. In some cases too much of the learning curve is caused by bad design (not discoverable, odd feature grouping that is there for no other reason than the fact that someone cobbled it together that way in V1, ...). Tantacrul's other videos on engraving software UX show some great examples of this, where improvements in UX can help without lowering the productivity plateau for experts (except of course throwing them back if you were to change what they've gotten used to from one version to the next).
Ericson2314 6y ago
Oh I don't want to lionize it either: "can" not "will" or or "is".

by bschne 6y ago

klodolph 6y ago

> There's definitely a point about commercial software overfitting on first-use experience as opposed to reaching a higher productivity / usefulness plateau with some initial investment. I would say… sure, that may be true for many apps. There are plenty of counterexamples, and I’d say MuseScore’s competitors (Finale, Sibelius, Dorico) are good examples of apps that are not tailored towards first-use experience as much as they are tailored for heavy users. They heavily rely on keyboard shortcuts and are modal (often to the point of being arcane, but UX is hard).

Ericson2314 6y ago
Have you seen tantacrul's other videos? I'd say besides Dorico they are also relics of that earlier area, like Adobe. Dorico is an interesting case. I'm curious how they were funded. The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated.
- klodolph 6y ago
  My experience with this software is primarily from using it myself. I don’t know if “relics of that earlier era” is accurate, and I’m not sure what era we’re talking about here. Why do you say that they’re relics of an earlier era? > I'm curious how they were funded. The story of Dorico is pretty simple. Avid bought Sibelius back in 2006 because they needed a good score writing solution—Avid presumably wanted to provide a “complete solution”—but Avid closed the office, and the same team of developers then made Dorico which was bought by Steinberg for presumably the same reasons that Avid bought Sibelius. Take a look at film/TV scoring, which is where a big chunk of the money is for working composers. There are three main DAWs in use: Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic Pro. It makes a ton of sense that you’d want to have a score writing program to sell alongside your DAW, so Avid and Steinberg did that by acquiring existing software. Logic Pro can… sort of… already edit scores. Logic is not nearly on the level of a proper score writing program but it’s still fairly solid and works for composition. > The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated. This doesn’t follow at all. If you’re a freelance composer or transcriber, then even marginal improvements in productivity can more or less be thought of as pay raises or additional free time. If you’re doing a proper TV or film production, then you might have something like 10% of your entire budget set aside for music. Composers aren’t really interchangeable anyway—if you want someone to make a decent score for your TV show, then you can’t find them on Fiverr. My general impression is that when you meet someone who is a professional in a particular field—even if that field is not highly paid—then a $600 business expense that improves productivity is not hard to justify.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
As is true of almost all "creativity" apps. DAWs, video editors, animation tools, paint applications - there are few highly featured examples of this software that do not require a serious learning committment before being comfortable.
- bschne 6y ago
  Yes, but to me the important difference lies in what proportion of that learning curve is conceptual/inherent in the domain (knowing what 100 filters and their parameters, or 25 different layer blend modes do; Learning what filter you need to apply to get from some initial state to some desired state, etc. In some cases too much of the learning curve is caused by bad design (not discoverable, odd feature grouping that is there for no other reason than the fact that someone cobbled it together that way in V1, ...). Tantacrul's other videos on engraving software UX show some great examples of this, where improvements in UX can help without lowering the productivity plateau for experts (except of course throwing them back if you were to change what they've gotten used to from one version to the next).

Ericson2314 6y ago

Oh I don't want to lionize it either: "can" not "will" or or "is".