Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius

If anyone is yet to see it, Tantacrul (on youtube) is now deeply involved with MuseScore (UX lead or similar?); he put out an awesome vid on the design of MS4 at the beginning of the year: link His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: ▶ this video

Since Sibelius and Finale are two industry-leading (and very much competing) music notation software systems, this headline made me do a quadruple-take! link link For those interested in (extremely entertaining) breakdowns of the Sibelius software and other offerings in this space from a UI/UX design perspective, I highly recommend Tantacrul's videos, which propelled him to becoming the head designer for MuseScore and Audacity. IMO, this and his Dorico video are must-watch crash-courses for any developer touching UX design, even outside of music! ▶ this video

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( link ) and youtube ( link ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, ▶ this video , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

The cheese melts in the microwave; the music melts in Sibelius. Tantacrul’s review of Sibelius’ might be the most entertaining serious critique of a software user interface ever posted to YouTube. ▶ this video

Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: link Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: ▶ this video

We are very, very far away from that. To get a feel of what scorewriter software is like nowadays, Tantacrul's videos[0] on the subject of UI are very good at showing what the state of the art is. On one of his videos he shows that the best score engraving can only be achieved by using a closed source, now-unsupported command line program from the 80s called Score[1] [0] ▶ this video [1] link

The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. ▶ this video link

This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. ▶ this video

Obligatory posting of Tantacrul's hilariously vicious kicking of Sibelius[0] "This really is one of the great examples of breaking all UI design principles and every UX design principle too. It's like a design bull in a musical china shop." ▶ this video [0] They may have fixed things in the intervening 8 years, I'm not a composer, I don't know.

Relevant Tantacrul video on the erosion of the Sibelius UI: ▶ this video I used Sibelius extensively circa version 5, and refused to upgrade for many years. I used it to get through my music minor in college. I still have the installer and a k*ygen on a hard drive somewhere since they stopped selling licenses to it and I lost mine. Still my preferred software, and yes I've tried Musescore. It's not nearly the same. Old software still works.

That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3]) [0] link [1] link [2] ▶ this video [3] link

I was wondering why the name Avid was familiar but also had a negative connotation in my head, then I remembered it was from a YouTube video [1] about how horrible its interface is. 1. ▶ this video