Reflections on "Intuitive"

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#41

The discussion around intuitiveness here supports what I already learned when discussing this with other people. People tend to think what they have already learned about some program to be intuitive because it’s familiar to them. They always forget what it took to learn those things. When they start to use another similar program they are frustrated because they have to learn workflows again. Forgetting the effort they put into learning the previous program they might think the new one is unintuitive because what they learned no longer applies.

This why there are so many opinions about what intuitive means.

True intuitiveness for me means: “can I figure out how a thing works by visual clues in the user interface”. This is a completely separate discussion from the above. The developer can put in visual clues in the GUI about how to get things done (icons, buttons, wizards and such) and make things easy for newcomers.

I used to teach Pro Tools for users and have seen the troubles users have learning a new tool. The absolutely single best measure I have found about how easy / hard a thing is to do for the user is to measure how many mouse clicks it takes. If some workflow takes 2 - 3 mouse clicks then it’s easy to remember and people find it easy to do. If it takes more than 5 mouse clicks it’s probably too hard for the user because there are too many steps to remember correctly and too many possibilities for clicking a wrong option.

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#43

I agree with your point completely. I regard using terms such as “intuitive” or “instinctive” to be misconceptions in a philosophical way. “Instinctive” is the behavior of an amoeba or prey: impulse leads to reaction - attack leads to running away.
Intuition does not exist in software. We learn to use software while building on previous experiences and lessons learned.
“Intuitive interface” is too often an expression of “TL;DR” / "didn’t want/bother to learn anything new ". I’ve taught an American to drive a manual gearbox car :slight_smile: The first 5 meters took 15 minutes, but finally we were moving.

#44

My version of intuitiveness includes a test for how well I can recall how to use the tool when I have been away from it for a while. Ardour is not too bad - it shares many of the fundamental behaviours of other good DAWs.

If I take a few weeks or months away from recording, I can get up and running with Ardour pretty quickly.

Blender, which someone referenced above, is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare to learn and it’s easy to forget. Coming back to Blender after months or years is a complete reset of skills. CAD software in general is a nightmare too (I know Blender isn’t CAD) and it is the model the Ardour should avoid like the plague.

An example of very good general UI that is “learned” intuitive is the use of WASD keys and associated keys for gaming. All games do it basically the same way, the most used keys are selected by where they need for real-time efficiency (reload, crouch, etc.) Any keyboard gamer knows how to get up and going in any “standard” game and then figures out the minor variations they need to know.

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#45

I had quite a battle for a few weeks, to get into Ardour.

I do not believe anybody can code a program that everybody will find intuitive.

Blender is a good example. Some love the GUI, some hate it.
Me coming from cad software, I hated it. It really took me some time to get used to it.

What I like about most CAD programs is that when you type or select a command, the program will then
tell you what kind of input it wants. (select a line or point or what ever)

I would not call these programs intuitive though. You will have to learn commands, and understand the GUI.

The same thing happened to me starting with Ardour. I felt at first beyond lost.

One thing I liked a lot from Atari and Apple, was the gui.
It did not matter if you were on the desktop or in a program.
The commands / options at the top of the screen will always look somewhat the same.

A you tuber asked a few pro audio people, what the best DAW was.
Their answer was; The one you can work with best.

I am / was a long time lmms user.
Is LMMS easier to start with ? yes, BUT…

There is so much Ardour can do LMMS can’t.
I do not see how you can make a program with a lot more options and possibilities, as simple a far more limited program.

Look at Catia, There is almost nothing it cant do.
Besides helping with making a CAD drawing, it can help with strength calculations, and flow simulations.
Programs like this will never be a simple as paint.

Ardour is about recording and it can do also do midi.
Most daw are more aimed at people behind a pc, that want to make music, not necessary record music.

I did take me some time to get used to it, but i am getting there.
The Ardour gui is different from what I am used to, but it also feels very well thought over.

#46

I am self-taught with Ardour, the only DAW I’ve used and am really impressed with how intuitive it is. While it’s the only DAW I’ve used, my professional past has included extensive industrial noise and vibration work utilizing high-end technical software to compare with Ardour. I ran sound for a band back in the 80’s, mixing board workflow mindset kicked in, easy to self-teach, love the gui. Great work, love Ardour- thank you!

#47

Looks like @paul and @powahserge are saying the same thing, but from different perspectives of the learning curve :wink:

That said, there are some really interesting thoughts in this thread, starting with @paul s original post, which captures the challenge for multi purpose software (recording, mixing, arranging, ideation, sound design, film post production etc.) pretty well.

What I missed in the discussion so far is the importance of complexity management.
The most important is already in Ardour: A logical approach that you can learn and apply across the software (ie. playlists, curves, tools behavior, pin routing).
Scripting allows direct access to getting stuff done with that logic.
Then there are helpers such as hiding and showing parts of the projects, which allow tweaking the main views further for specific tasks. This shows already what has been stated in comparison to audacity. For some tasks, lack of visible features is just as important as their availability.

And this is exactly what makes complexity manageable. This is where Ardour can improve.

For me, the most missed features are folder tracks (shows less while allowing access), and searchable menus (hides long lists), like in the settings, but across the entire application. Blender has been showing nicely how this can bring complexity down to a new level. If you hear someone saying he did subdivide, you do not have to learn a menu location, but you can just type the word you heard and see the result for yourself. That is pretty intuitive.

Regarding the folder tracks, they make the most sense with the ability to edit all the regions inside.

Summary

(think drum multitracking, in nuendo or reaper (?), I can work on the drum entire session, with phase alignment and chop away, without loosing the individual tracks to a stem)

Oh, one more thing. Can we get vim behavior across the entire application please :nerd_face:? (Only half kidding, imagine audio vim). But vim is another example of intuitive after learning curve. Just as Ardour, it leverages modality to a very high degree)
.

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#48

TBH, the old Blender frontend was pretty crappy. It was meant as an in-house app and, like Maya, originally developed on SGI Irix.

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#49

Totally, it was horrible. Even today, you won’t get far without keyboard shortcuts e, s, x and r. Still, I find it remarkable, how they managed to make it highly efficient and intuitive in the last 10 years. Making everything searchable was imho one of their best ideas ever, for reasons explained in my previous posts.