8 ms·

I’m working with the Audacity dev team on a redesign of the UI/UX. More on this soon!

ketzo 6y ago
Wow, that's awesome news! I'm super interested in the UI design of really complex applications (like Audacity, or Photoshop, etc.). I would adore some kind of writeup on y'all's design process whenever you towards the end! (Obviously a big ask for someone already doing a bunch of work for free, pls feel free to ignore me; just saying that I'd be interested :D)
- noizejoy 6y ago
  You could volunteer ...
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  Even a short design rationale would be fascinating.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cprecioso 6y ago
  I think you should check out Tentacruel’s videos on YouTube about the UX of music composing suites!
  - jagger27 6y ago
    *Tantacrul
  - xmprt 6y ago
    I found that video fascinating even though I couldn't really related to any of the tools he was talking about since I've never composed music in the past. Having actually used Audacity and Photoshop, I'd love to learn a bit more about how those design decisions were made.
    - cprecioso 6y ago
      I've never composed either, but most of his complaints are not about the specifics of the programmes but about how they fail at communicating them. Repetition, omission, modality, hiding, or over-highlighting, are problems that can crop up in any software, and he's teaching you how those are perceived by users.
- mortenjorck 6y ago
  Even more interesting to me, at least, would be a writeup on how the project came to be in the first place. Long-running open-source projects have a (perhaps unfair) reputation for being somewhere between ambivalent and hostile toward proposals for sweeping UX improvements, and it could be instructive to learn how this initiative got off the ground.
  - eitland 6y ago
    There was an interview many years ago, back when I was a student maybe, but I cannot remember where I read it (best guess is Sourceforge "Project of the Month" which used to be a thing back then at least. The only thing I think I can remember clearly however was the question about the biggest regret which I think was one particular core datastructure that was an array but which they later wished they had used a linked list for instead.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
      I feel like changing an array to a linked list couldn't be that hard, but I don't know the particular complications.
      - eitland 6y ago
        Exactly, and neither do I, I have mostly worked on Java and and with IDEs that would tell me in a nice way if what I did didn't make sense.
- danybittel 6y ago
  I've been designing a complex desktop application.. there's not that much info out there. I found these helpful: Designing the Win95: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... Also the final design guides: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M... A (really old) book: https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=about+face&qid=1616050002&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Des... Another book: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Patterns-Effective-Interaction/dp/1492051969/ref=pd_sbs_4?pd_rd_w=HQRML&pf_rd_p=527ea27c-adf6-4b67-9c5f-265eb29e0622&pf_rd_r=A8VA18BM21JAZ1KQJJMZ&pd_rd_r=2525d4f9-fe7a-479a-b945-a0d5054a93b3&pd_rd_wg=npsDd&pd_rd_i=1492051969&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Patterns-Effecti... Oddly enough these are all ancient. There hasn't been much innovation in that space though. (apart from High Dpi and Dark Mode) Blender recently did a redesign of their UI, they have lot's of discussions about their rationale.
  - PostThisTooFast 6y ago
    "Dark mode" is not an innovation. It's a half-assed reversal of a regression. Computers used to show light characters on a dark background. 8-bit platforms often defaulted to white text on a dark-blue background, which until just a few years ago was still available in Word as a checkbox option. Then the "desktop publishing" craze came along, and brought the analogy of a computer screen to a piece of paper. But this inverse (black text on a white background) scheme ignored the fact that paper doesn't EMIT light. Using these systems was akin to reading the label on the surface of a lit light bulb all day. But for two decades, Windows let you set up a system-wide color scheme whose colors would be inherited by (nearly) all applications. It was great; you could (and I did, in the early '90s) replace the dumb inverse default color scheme with a "charcoal" scheme... essentially exactly what most "dark modes" are today. I think Unix GUIs allowed you to set up color schemes too, leaving only the vaunted Mac GUI as the hard-coded,glaring eyeball-strainer of the era. But now that people are finally realizing that inverse color schemes suck, what did Microsoft do? REMOVE the color-scheme editor from Windows. So now we're being dribbled out "dark mode" one OS, Web page, and application at a time. And it's still hard-coded. That's not innovation. It's pathetic.
leviathant 6y ago
This is fantastic news!
the_cat_kittles 6y ago
im sure youve heard it before, but priority 1 for me is get the playhead scrubbing reset and looping all sorted. something like logic is very intuitive imo. cheers!
- dharma1 6y ago
  I also really like how intuitive looping is in Logic. They’ve done many things right - been a happy user since the Emagic days
akersten 6y ago
Another happy Audacity user here, great to hear it's going to get a refresh. My only request is that performance is kept top-of-mind - using Audacity is snappy and responsive even on ancient hardware, which makes it just a pleasure to use. UI interactions feel instant. The contrast to a slow Electron app like Slack is night and day.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Agreed, but thats the tragedy of desktop ui development. Either you get pretty but electron app where loading a few hundred messages grinds it to a halt Or you get ancient looking Ui Or you get platform spesific stuff! Actually Java applications are kinda reasonable compromise
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > Actually Java applications are kinda reasonable compromise As are .NET applications. Yeah, most .NET desktop apps in the wild are technically chock full of Windowsisms, I've found that said apps more often than not Just Work(TM) on e.g. Linux w/ Mono, and alternative toolkits like Avalonia help further.
  - 177tcca 6y ago
    Material Design .NET applications okay?
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I've found the exact opposite - Audacity used to be instant, but these days its UI is dog slow. It seems to struggle badly on high-DPI displays: it is almost unusable maximized on both macOS and Linux (X11) if you have a 4K or so display. It feels like it's actively gotten worse on this front. I'm hoping this is something that improved in 3.0.0, because using Audacity is becoming increasingly impractical. I was just trying to listen to 10 tracks one by one yesterday and even just muting/soloing a track would take about a second; it was horrible. Shrinking the window helps, but it's silly to have a tiny window and scroll around when you have a 4K display. I kind of suspect this to be a windowing toolkit issue, and originally I thought it was macOS-specific (since I first noticed when I tried to recommend it to friends who use that), but ever since I moved to a 4K screen on Linux I noticed it's bad here too... The Mac story is here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=111105 https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=111105 The workaround is, well, not using HiDPI mode which is silly. But Audacity doesn't even seem to support HiDPI mode on Linux properly to begin with (the entire UI is small), so that's not it per se... I guess wxGTK just struggles when it has to draw 4x as many pixels? Apparently it's bad on Windows too: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=111857 https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=111857
WhiteNoiz3 6y ago
My biggest pet peeve - just allow me to save a .wav file without having me make a project or 'export' it! It would be a huge time saver as I am usually just editing one file at a time, not mixing.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Preferences -> Keyboard -> Assign keybind to "Export as WAV" It's still called an export, but it's basically doing exactly what you're asking for.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  I get it, but on the other hand isn't that a bit like saying "why do I need to print to PDF instead of just save as PDF?" The UI isn't ideal but the feature isn't terribly buried. It's because the format you want (regardless of it being the same format you started with) can't store quite as much metadata about your changes as the app's native format.
SirLotsaLocks 6y ago
That's really exciting
dehrmann 6y ago
Maybe this already happens, but I wish more designers contributed to open source. There are a a lot open source projects that are UX polish away from being viable alternatives to commercial products.
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  Well, their changes have to be accepted. A lot of established contributors to (and users of) these open-source projects are belligerent apologists for their shitty UI. But really, you find that in any forum. People get bent out of shape that you're pointing out flaws in their pet product, and pile on with claims that amount to, essentially, "you're holding it wrong."
MrMan 6y ago
Please get them to add MMC sync, it would make recording much better
happyconcepts 6y ago
Please be gentle for those of us who've grown accustomed to the UI thus far along the journey.
- tomcooks 6y ago
  Exactly, a lot of pro users depend on this swiss army knife and they had to get used to work around it's peculiar UI. Maybe a custom config profile that is very easy to tune, import and export would allow redesign to get radical without compromising old users
pmayrgundter 6y ago
Please consider web first!
- tomcooks 6y ago
  And then when there's no internet in the studio you're stuck? Ehh
  - pmayrgundter 6y ago
    Well, take a look at eg theia-ide.org. you can begin use on web and then run locally, either as docker or built from git source project. Web is portable, even offline
- majewsky 6y ago
  There's enough web-only stuff as it is. I'm thankful for everything that does not require a constant internet connection. For instance, I have already used Audacity to edit a radio show while on a train.

Wow, that's awesome news! I'm super interested in the UI design of really complex applications (like Audacity, or Photoshop, etc.). I would adore some kind of writeup on y'all's design process whenever you towards the end! (Obviously a big ask for someone already doing a bunch of work for free, pls feel free to ignore me; just saying that I'd be interested :D)

noizejoy 6y ago
You could volunteer ...
germinalphrase 6y ago
Even a short design rationale would be fascinating.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cprecioso 6y ago
I think you should check out Tentacruel’s videos on YouTube about the UX of music composing suites!
- jagger27 6y ago
  *Tantacrul
- xmprt 6y ago
  I found that video fascinating even though I couldn't really related to any of the tools he was talking about since I've never composed music in the past. Having actually used Audacity and Photoshop, I'd love to learn a bit more about how those design decisions were made.
  - cprecioso 6y ago
    I've never composed either, but most of his complaints are not about the specifics of the programmes but about how they fail at communicating them. Repetition, omission, modality, hiding, or over-highlighting, are problems that can crop up in any software, and he's teaching you how those are perceived by users.
mortenjorck 6y ago
Even more interesting to me, at least, would be a writeup on how the project came to be in the first place. Long-running open-source projects have a (perhaps unfair) reputation for being somewhere between ambivalent and hostile toward proposals for sweeping UX improvements, and it could be instructive to learn how this initiative got off the ground.
- eitland 6y ago
  There was an interview many years ago, back when I was a student maybe, but I cannot remember where I read it (best guess is Sourceforge "Project of the Month" which used to be a thing back then at least. The only thing I think I can remember clearly however was the question about the biggest regret which I think was one particular core datastructure that was an array but which they later wished they had used a linked list for instead.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
    I feel like changing an array to a linked list couldn't be that hard, but I don't know the particular complications.
    - eitland 6y ago
      Exactly, and neither do I, I have mostly worked on Java and and with IDEs that would tell me in a nice way if what I did didn't make sense.
danybittel 6y ago
I've been designing a complex desktop application.. there's not that much info out there. I found these helpful: Designing the Win95: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... Also the final design guides: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M... A (really old) book: https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=about+face&qid=1616050002&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Des... Another book: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Patterns-Effective-Interaction/dp/1492051969/ref=pd_sbs_4?pd_rd_w=HQRML&pf_rd_p=527ea27c-adf6-4b67-9c5f-265eb29e0622&pf_rd_r=A8VA18BM21JAZ1KQJJMZ&pd_rd_r=2525d4f9-fe7a-479a-b945-a0d5054a93b3&pd_rd_wg=npsDd&pd_rd_i=1492051969&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Patterns-Effecti... Oddly enough these are all ancient. There hasn't been much innovation in that space though. (apart from High Dpi and Dark Mode) Blender recently did a redesign of their UI, they have lot's of discussions about their rationale.
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  "Dark mode" is not an innovation. It's a half-assed reversal of a regression. Computers used to show light characters on a dark background. 8-bit platforms often defaulted to white text on a dark-blue background, which until just a few years ago was still available in Word as a checkbox option. Then the "desktop publishing" craze came along, and brought the analogy of a computer screen to a piece of paper. But this inverse (black text on a white background) scheme ignored the fact that paper doesn't EMIT light. Using these systems was akin to reading the label on the surface of a lit light bulb all day. But for two decades, Windows let you set up a system-wide color scheme whose colors would be inherited by (nearly) all applications. It was great; you could (and I did, in the early '90s) replace the dumb inverse default color scheme with a "charcoal" scheme... essentially exactly what most "dark modes" are today. I think Unix GUIs allowed you to set up color schemes too, leaving only the vaunted Mac GUI as the hard-coded,glaring eyeball-strainer of the era. But now that people are finally realizing that inverse color schemes suck, what did Microsoft do? REMOVE the color-scheme editor from Windows. So now we're being dribbled out "dark mode" one OS, Web page, and application at a time. And it's still hard-coded. That's not innovation. It's pathetic.

leviathant 6y ago

This is fantastic news!

the_cat_kittles 6y ago

im sure youve heard it before, but priority 1 for me is get the playhead scrubbing reset and looping all sorted. something like logic is very intuitive imo. cheers!

dharma1 6y ago
I also really like how intuitive looping is in Logic. They’ve done many things right - been a happy user since the Emagic days

akersten 6y ago

Another happy Audacity user here, great to hear it's going to get a refresh. My only request is that performance is kept top-of-mind - using Audacity is snappy and responsive even on ancient hardware, which makes it just a pleasure to use. UI interactions feel instant. The contrast to a slow Electron app like Slack is night and day.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Agreed, but thats the tragedy of desktop ui development. Either you get pretty but electron app where loading a few hundred messages grinds it to a halt Or you get ancient looking Ui Or you get platform spesific stuff! Actually Java applications are kinda reasonable compromise
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > Actually Java applications are kinda reasonable compromise As are .NET applications. Yeah, most .NET desktop apps in the wild are technically chock full of Windowsisms, I've found that said apps more often than not Just Work(TM) on e.g. Linux w/ Mono, and alternative toolkits like Avalonia help further.
- 177tcca 6y ago
  Material Design .NET applications okay?
marcan_42 6y ago
I've found the exact opposite - Audacity used to be instant, but these days its UI is dog slow. It seems to struggle badly on high-DPI displays: it is almost unusable maximized on both macOS and Linux (X11) if you have a 4K or so display. It feels like it's actively gotten worse on this front. I'm hoping this is something that improved in 3.0.0, because using Audacity is becoming increasingly impractical. I was just trying to listen to 10 tracks one by one yesterday and even just muting/soloing a track would take about a second; it was horrible. Shrinking the window helps, but it's silly to have a tiny window and scroll around when you have a 4K display. I kind of suspect this to be a windowing toolkit issue, and originally I thought it was macOS-specific (since I first noticed when I tried to recommend it to friends who use that), but ever since I moved to a 4K screen on Linux I noticed it's bad here too... The Mac story is here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=111105 https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=111105 The workaround is, well, not using HiDPI mode which is silly. But Audacity doesn't even seem to support HiDPI mode on Linux properly to begin with (the entire UI is small), so that's not it per se... I guess wxGTK just struggles when it has to draw 4x as many pixels? Apparently it's bad on Windows too: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=111857 https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=111857

WhiteNoiz3 6y ago

My biggest pet peeve - just allow me to save a .wav file without having me make a project or 'export' it! It would be a huge time saver as I am usually just editing one file at a time, not mixing.

falcolas 6y ago
Preferences -> Keyboard -> Assign keybind to "Export as WAV" It's still called an export, but it's basically doing exactly what you're asking for.
hunter2_ 6y ago
I get it, but on the other hand isn't that a bit like saying "why do I need to print to PDF instead of just save as PDF?" The UI isn't ideal but the feature isn't terribly buried. It's because the format you want (regardless of it being the same format you started with) can't store quite as much metadata about your changes as the app's native format.

SirLotsaLocks 6y ago

That's really exciting

dehrmann 6y ago

Maybe this already happens, but I wish more designers contributed to open source. There are a a lot open source projects that are UX polish away from being viable alternatives to commercial products.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago
Well, their changes have to be accepted. A lot of established contributors to (and users of) these open-source projects are belligerent apologists for their shitty UI. But really, you find that in any forum. People get bent out of shape that you're pointing out flaws in their pet product, and pile on with claims that amount to, essentially, "you're holding it wrong."

MrMan 6y ago

Please get them to add MMC sync, it would make recording much better

happyconcepts 6y ago

Please be gentle for those of us who've grown accustomed to the UI thus far along the journey.

tomcooks 6y ago
Exactly, a lot of pro users depend on this swiss army knife and they had to get used to work around it's peculiar UI. Maybe a custom config profile that is very easy to tune, import and export would allow redesign to get radical without compromising old users

pmayrgundter 6y ago

Please consider web first!

tomcooks 6y ago
And then when there's no internet in the studio you're stuck? Ehh
- pmayrgundter 6y ago
  Well, take a look at eg theia-ide.org. you can begin use on web and then run locally, either as docker or built from git source project. Web is portable, even offline
majewsky 6y ago
There's enough web-only stuff as it is. I'm thankful for everything that does not require a constant internet connection. For instance, I have already used Audacity to edit a radio show while on a train.