The open source music notation software MuseScore used to be really, really bad. A musician and UX designer gave it a scathing review in a humorous YouTube video. And then the company behind MuseScore hired that YouTuber and spent a lot of effort doing a major redesign, and now it’s actually quite good.
All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren’t the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.
This is a huge victory, the big takeaway for me is that the person who smack talked the software was willing to get in the room with the designers and help them out. It’s easy to complain, it’s a lot more work to complain, run through user tests, file bug reports, etc. So bravo to that person, and hopefully we can see this sort of outcome on more software.
I was a happy MuseScore user before and after the UI changes. So this post brings to mind questions that usually float in my mind:
- When I can happily use a thing whose UX is criticized: is it just because I don’t know any better alternatives, or because I’ve spent so long with it that of course I know how to work it? Or is the UX really not that bad? Or is it that there are often general solutions for most of the population, but sometimes some people take really well to things that work poorly for others and vice versa? Is it that the hated parts are bits I do not touch much in my workflow, so of course I see no problems because I am not interacting with the problem parts?
- When I have difficulty using a thing whose UX is praised or has no criticism: is it because I am smoothbrained? That I just have not had enough time trying to figure it out, so of course I struggle and just need to apply myself more? Is it something that works for most, but it will not work for everyone? Am I in a really niche use case with bad UX that nobody else has bothered to complain about?
I do not have enough UX knowledge to criticize or make objective evaluations here. I only have how easy it is for me to navigate applications. Though I would like to work on gaining it someday, especially so I can help out FOSS targets of “bad UX” complaints.
I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can’t comment from extensive personal experience.
But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I’m sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.
As a general rule, a good UX should:
- Make it very, very easy to do (or discover how to do) the most common basic things, and should result in them being done in the way a user expects
- Not slow down a power user from accomplishing basic tasks at speed
- Allow easy discovery of and access to less common tasks
A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.
Love tentacrul. I re-watch that video from time to time just because it’s so good. It was also really funny watching a later video of his where he just casually dropped that he was working on musescore.
That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it’s hard to go past the Sibelius one if I’m gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.
The conclusion I got from the video was that, while it’s very powerful software, it’s very difficult for new users to start using the program due to unintuitive placement of options. That’s how he, for a lack of better word, reviews each piece of software, from the eyes of a new user.
But on the other hand, the video is also 7 years old at this point so maybe sibbelius has fixed some of the stuff that he pointed out. I don’t really compose music so I honestly wouldn’t know.
Unfortunately Sibelius’s development has basically stagnated since 2012 when the new corporate owners fired the entire original development team, with only one noteworthy release of the core app (not counting side-projects like an iPad app) since then, in 2014.
I first learnt Sibelius on its pre-ribbon interface, which I think was much better (even though I loved the ribbon in MS Office). That certainly made the transfer to more modern versions easier. Still, although Sibelius has a number of specific hangups in its interface that make fairly common activities awkward and unintuitive, I really do think it has the best basic flow. When you’re just in the zone inputting notes, it’s so easy to use in a way MuseScore isn’t.
I actually take some issue with Tantacrul’s design process, because it feels like he fundamentally doesn’t understand how intermediate users like myself use the app. At one point he sent out a survey asking “how many keyboard shortcuts do you use?” in Sibelius/MuseScore etc. The problem was that he didn’t define what a keyboard shortcuts is, and when people asked for his definition, he just snarkily responded that it would be obvious. But it’s not. In Sibelius, you use your left hand on letters A–G to enter the note pitch, and your right hand on the notepad to enter rhythm values and common articulations. Slur lines and some other things can be entered during this process as well (slurs with the letter S).
Does this count as keyboard shortcuts? To me, everything I described above except maybe the slurs is actually the musical equivalent of typing text into a word processor…or a browser text box, like I’m doing right now. Does it become a “keyboard shortcut” just because it can also be done by clicking a rhythm value in a toolbar, and then clicking a location in the staff to choose pitch? I have no idea if Tantacrul thinks so, because he chose snark rather than clarifying.
Incidentally, his MuseScore design replicates this flow, but without the visual reference of the keypad toolbar that lets you learn and easily see what number to press, without requiring sheer memorisation. It’s been a while since I last tried it, but I vaguely recall having other issues with the flow being hard to work out with a keyboard. Great if you’re just slowly mousing around everywhere, but not for the intermediate user trying to get in the zone.
Which is such a shame, because he did such a fantastic job of the other stuff. The user onboarding, score setup, page layout management, etc. The attention to detail even with small things like music fonts and symbol design is impeccable.
But it is a skill issue, just UI/UX design skill. Not software development skill.
I like GTK and it’s really simple to make good looking functional UI with GTK4, but apparently people have a hate boner for anything good looking, GTK or Gnome related
From what I’ve heard about it, it’s because the default gtk style only fits in with gnome, and gtk4 made it really difficult to customise it and is also really buggy on anything not gnome.
That’s what I’ve heard anyway, I’m not a distro dev and the distro I last used is still on gtk3
Users: I demand OSS devs and Maintainers do X
OSS Devs/Maintainers: Are you willing to contribute code or at least donate any money?
Users: Uhh its OSS, you should just do all the work for free with no funding. Also I demand that your software be as polished and complete as (premium proprietary software) I demand you do X, I demand you do Y, because im entitled to free software.
I am sympathetic but also so damn tired of seeing what essentially translates to:
“Look, [megacorpo] bought out my school’s ecosystem so that’s all I learned. It’s “industry standard”, I can’t believe this FOSS can’t even do this one niche corporate-job feature, therefore it’s objectively terrible / not ready / inferior / useless for job work.”
Which can usually be further boiled down to:
“I tried it but it wasn’t a carbon copy of my preferred corpo-ware without any strings attached so it basically sucks.”
Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven’t touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.
Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.
Totally can be! Absolutely!
Although Blender’s amazingly usable now and has had lots of love in that regard! But it took a LOT of support to get this far.
Good UX is crazy important.
I think I’m more irritated at the people who seem to show up in so many FOSS discussions, expect FOSS alternatives to compete 1:1 with their billion-dollar corpo-ware of choice, demand the world of it, offer zero support, and then declare “it sucks and isn’t ready for the real world” because it’s not so perfect that Autodesk and Adobe are like “Well we’ve had a good run, guys.” and give up lol.
I sympathize because I know where the frustration comes from. They’re sick of their tools being held hostage by interests that constantly seek to screw them! But change requires flexibility, cooperation, and support.
I think a lot of people just don’t want to say “I want Maya/Photoshop/Excel/Solidworks/Windows/etc…but free and without dark-patterns!” (Don’t we all lol) Because they know that sounds unreasonable (yarr aside lol) , but people tend to get settled and comfortable with whatever got to them first.
But taking that out on the community isn’t helping anybody.
Constructive criticism of UI/UX is absolutely essential though, and requires a lot more understanding of how humans interact with things than simply “Well, billion-dollar-ware has always done it this way.” Haha
Absolutely this, you cannot expect Blender level UI/UX without blender level funding. The fundamental problem is that new users/inexperienced users/nontechnical users arent used to contributing bug reports or even proper constructive criticism.
Furthermore what people forget is that being a 1:1 carbon copy of a corporate software isnt inherently a good thing. For example Linux, I love Linux and I love the way it works. I use it not because its OSS but because I genuenly prefer it above Windows, I dont want Linux to be like Windows. I love tiling, I love Sway, I love Hyprland, and despite being in alpha I love the Cosmic Desktop. I dont care that tiling isnt immediately intuitive to Windows users, I absolutely love it.
While im at it I absolutely despise the idea that the Terminal is inherently not user friendly (especially with a shell like fish). The idea that just because somebody isnt used to something makes it bad. Or that having to use a wiki/look at the docs means its “not ready”. All software is new to somebody at some point, that doesn’t make it bad.
