

Against UI Chrome (not the browser) - zdw
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/against-chrome-a-manifesto.html

======
efields
The enemy here is an abuse of skeuomorphic[1] design principles. The Reason
and iBook examples are the most blatant abuses of this technique.

Buttons are a good example of skeuomorphic done right. In real life, if
something's supposed to be turned, I expect it to be a knob. If something's
going to be pulled, I expect there to be a handle. Since you're expected to
click or tap buttons, it they should obviously look like buttons.

I think that Apple's decision to continue buttonizing touch UI was probably
wise in the beginning, but seeing Windows Phone 7's all flat everything
approach feels really fresh. Why don't they chrome up their touchable objects?
Because its a _touch screen_ and the only thing you can POSSIBLY do is _touch_
them. The context is I took out my device to do something with it, I expect to
be touching things.

So while buttons may still need to be buttons on the desktop, I'm happy to see
chrome fade away in touch UIs.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph>

~~~
adw
Reason is _fantastic_. It's actually a fantastically intuitive interface for
its target market, and what's more, it's psychologically effective.

The skeumorphism in Reason is _so_ over-the-top – there's a physics engine in
there! - that it gets you in the right mindset: it's playful, it doesn't take
itself seriously, and that's exactly what you need to get making music. It's
exactly the opposite of WriteRoom because it's serving a very different
mindset.

~~~
icarus_drowning
I use Reason every day, and while I assure that its design was somewhat
appealing at first, the sheer _insanity_ of having to deal with virtual
instruments and sequencers as if they were the "real thing" grows tiring
_extremely_ quickly.

Even during my education, wherein I dealt with more than a few individuals in
Reason's "target market" (see: aging film composers who have spent their fair
share of time plugging real cables into real sequencers) found it appalling
and difficult to use.

The only reason I still use the program at all is because it has a few
excellent patches built into it. The fact that I have to wade through the
swamp of illogic that is its user interface remains one of most frustrating
parts of my job as a media composer.

~~~
moe
Also, one of the ironies in reason is that you quickly arrive at the point
where you want to wire the relevant knobs and dials to _one_ central virtual
control surface, because scrolling up and down over 3 screens full of devices
gets old rather fast.

But there is no such thing that I know of (in Reason4), so without a physical
MIDI control surface you're effectively lost.

Disclaimer: I'm only a casual Reason user, perhaps I'm missing something. I
also hear Reason5 has some improvements but haven't upgraded yet.

------
davidedicillo
While I agree to some extent I think that the physical appearance on touch
devices is necessary. I think that a button needs to look like a button,
because I can't just explore with my mouse and wait for a rollover effect to
understand what's clickable. Also trial and error to find a link could be a
pretty frustrating process.

~~~
ugh
There needs to be some way to show what is tappable but I don’t think that
making all that look like buttons is necessary. If you look around iOS
(especially on the iPhone or iPod touch) you will see that very few tappable
elements actually do look like buttons, they don’t have to. Only potentially
risky actions are brightly colored and look like buttons, for example “Send”
or “Delete”. I would argue that it wouldn’t matter much if you were to ditch
the gradients and shadows and just go with bright colors and rounded corners.

------
pavel_lishin
Speaking of chrome, I wish you wouldn't resize my entire browser window when I
open your image link in a new tab.

On a separate note, I hate the Windows phone examples he gave. My phone is a
communication device - I expect that no matter what I'm doing in the OS, the
clock, battery indicator, and my connection status ought to be visible.

~~~
Qz
Wow, that _is_ spectacularly obnoxious. Apparently I forgot to disable that in
firefox after I updated to windows 7...

------
anigbrowl
_Now, this kind of severe chromatosis is particularly widespread in music-
making applications, perhaps hoping to assuage the gear-nostalgia of composers
who once had actual knobs and buttons to play with but now are reduced to
pretending to operate pretend knobs and buttons on a screen. That's the only
reason I can think of for this, a kind of glorious reductio ad absurdum of
rampant chromiology, in Reason:_

Actually, I know the designers of Reason. That product was extremely
successful _because_ it presented users with an interface that they already
found familiar (dangling patch cables plugged into input/output panels on
audio gear) whereas most competitors were presenting and interface they did
not find familiar (signal routing as electronic schematics).

There are far more powerful programs than _Reason_ for making music. But apart
from Ableton Live (more modern, but until recently with much less control over
signal routing), they are considerably harder to use and have a much steeper
learning curve. I have 20 or 30 software packages like this (I used to work in
this industry) and while many of them allow open-ended schematics instead of
imposing this 'chrome' metaphor on the user, the downside of this is that
reading other people's schematics or learning to organize one's own is
difficult. A _Reason_ schematic is easy to read quickly because you know where
everything is, a lot of the choices have been made for you and you can focus
on what's distinctive about it instead of spending the first few minutes
trying to parse the graph.

At music biz trade shows, the probability that a vendor will speak of _Reason_
dismissively as a 'toy' is inversely related to the quality of the UI on their
soft/hardware. In an extreme case the 'software UI' turned out to be an IDE in
which you could write Motorola 56k assembler. A year after the firm went bust
the lead designer still claimed to be perplexed about why the music-making
public had failed to embrace the product.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
"The probability that a vendor will speak of <insert popular, easy-to-use
software here> dismissively as a 'toy' is inversely related to the quality of
the UI on their soft/hardware."

I think that could be said of just about every industry.

------
BoppreH
Dwarf Fortress. By far the most complex game I've ever played, and yet the
interface was simple.

The dozen-items menu you see on screen is just a block of text telling you the
hotkeys. Nothing to click, push or drag, no focus to worry about, you just
pressed keys away.

And once you memorize enough of them, you can just hide the big block of text
and go completely UI-free.

No wasted space, no button hunting or "I didn't know you could right-click".
Just you, the game, and the keyboard to translate your thoughts.

I wish it was possible to implement this in every software.

~~~
mey
DF is a bad example, because of the learning curve. There are things that the
UI could've done (especially if it left ncurses) that could make the game more
approachable for new players.

~~~
BoppreH
I always thought the hardest part of the learning curve was understanding the
game itself, not the interface. What each workshop does, why that dwarf have
been in bed for two months, what pissed the elves.

Not saying it's perfect either, but what do you think the UI could have done
better?

~~~
mey
The game operates like a cross between VIM and NetHack. You have to jump
between modes of operation (selection,placement,navigation,element action)

If the world was iso metic 2d, with context mouse sensative information, and
when clicking on something available

------
nphase
I agree, chromeless is nice. But I love Reason. I really enjoy being able to
immediately introspect into the signal path, something which can be much more
vague in other music apps. Ordering, layering, and combining effects are
common practices in sound engineering/recording/performing to achieve
different sounds. Being able to explicitly define the path in the chrome is
actually quite handy.

Chrome _can_ be a good thing. Really.

~~~
beefman
There are better ways to show signal path than a bunch of droopy patch cables.

~~~
texel
How would you propose to do it then?

~~~
beefman
Standard 2-D representations ala Kyma, Reaktor, Bidule, and the various audio
tables (Reactable et al).

------
S_A_P
Having used Reason, Logic and a huge amount of audio software, I can only half
heartedly agree with this post. Ultrabeat and some of Logics other
instruments(sculpture) are indeed examples of how not to do a UI.

Reason, for me is probably the most intuitive application I have used since I
initially was plugging hardware cables to make music. However, it certainly
isn't the most efficient way to patch something, but with the huge amount of
routing flexibility in that software, I don't see a better option, the context
menu for cable patching isn't really an effective method either since its list
can exceed the height of my screen in some cases. I find though that most
audio applications(reason included) do offer very flexible and easy linkage to
hardware controllers which makes life easier. Most audio processing is about
hands on control of many parameters simultaneously, and I think some of the
best solutions(jazz mutant had some purpose built touch control surfaces) were
much too expensive for the average user. I really hope that someone can make a
tablet based app equivalent for iOS/android that could mimic these types of
things. <shameless plug> (any software vendors want a dev(me) who would LOVE
to work on this sorta project?!?! :)</shameless plug>

One other point that wasnt addressed properly in this article is that much of
the "hardware look" UI chrome is due to these things being "emulations" of
real gear. I think the market has decided that if you want to model a piece of
gear, you had better draw up a photo-realistic picture of it and add some 3dfx
to the knobs and sliders. For better or worse, a lot of users just dont buy
into the sound emulation thing unless it looks like real device.

I have seen a lot of developers out there that have made some very functional
very pretty UIs that also look like gear. U-he, FXPansion come to mind.
Interestingly, Logic contains some very clean and easy to use UIs(the included
efx) along with the dogs like Sculpture and Ultrabeat. Hopefully Logic10 will
have a UI refresh to improve things...

~~~
kolektiv
A little off topic, but if you're looking for iPad touch control of things
like MIDI devices, hardware is already out there to do that. Projects like
touchOSC are providing the graphical instances, as well as others like
S1MIDITrigger. This is getting bigger and bigger, and I imagine that's the
reason Jazz Mutant packed it in - the writing was on the wall that the iPad is
storming this market.

~~~
S_A_P
Will look into touchOsc- thanks.

------
ligerhearted
This is why I loved the Full Flat Absolute Black[1] and its brethren themes
for Firefox back a few years ago, exclusively.

Sadly, the developer has not updated them in a long time (2008!), so one must
go through the hackish method of updating the maxVersion by downloading,
opening, and editing the addon oneself. Even with this, there are a few
platforms it doesn't work on fully.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/full-flat-
abs...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/full-flat-absolute-
black/)

------
mambodog
The field of music production does seem to be a bit of a magnet for this
skeuomorphic UI business. Having people coming from physical equipment is part
of it, but there is an aesthetic factor as well, which relates to the kind of
people musicians tend to be.

However, there is a new generation of UIs appearing in music production
software, and the German company _Native-Instruments_ seems to be playing a
big part in it. To contrast with the example of Ultrabeat from the article,
consider NI's drum sampler 'Battery'[1] which arranges the same controls (plus
some more) in a much more visually approachable manner, using strong, clean
lines, and tabs to navigate between less-used controls.

Similarly consider their synth 'Massive'[2], which also employs clean lines
and visual simplicity, and employs a system of colour-coding and numbering to
achieve what Reason does with it's cable spaghetti approach.

Also, I find the Windows 7 Phone UI to be really bland. It is about as far as
you can go in the opposite direction from a UI which has some sense of real-
world objects and forms, and I think somewhere in the middle would be more
desirable.

[1] [http://alex.leonard.ie/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/native-
ins...](http://alex.leonard.ie/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/native-instruments-
battery3.jpg)

[2] <http://static.kvraudio.com/i/b/massive.jpg>

~~~
MichaelGG
I found it interesting that REAKTOR 5.5[1] and Sonar X1[2] are both upgrades
that both tout an improved UI. Maybe a turning point has been reached? (After
using Ableton, I can't imaging using the crazy "gear" UIs.)

[1] [http://www.native-
instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/rea...](http://www.native-
instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/reaktor-5/) [2]
<http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/X1-overview.aspx>

------
kouiskas
If interfaces like reason's and ultrabeat's were the best UI possible for
music software, then the interface for Final Cut Pro would be a rack of
virtual VCRs and assorted machines, maybe even a bench for cutting and taping
virtual pieces of film together.

When all you're doing is copying the physical device experience, it's the
laziest UI design you can possibly make, completely ignoring the medium you're
working with. Sure it works, just as well as the physical machines with a
hundred buttons and knobs do, but it doesn't make use of all the possibilities
a computer can offer. The best and the worst of the physical experience has
been ported.

To me this is the same as emulating a rotary dial as a mobile phone's only
means of dialing a number. It only sounds ridiculous because we all know the
more efficient alternative. I think a lot of music software has yet to find
the UI breakthrough it needs. Whenever that happens and a new standard of
music software UI makes better use of the computer as medium, people will look
back at UIs like reason's and find it very misguided.

That doesn't mean the answer to all UI issues is to go minimalistic like the
article suggests, but I think real-life device mimicking is generally a sign
of lack of UI/usability hard work. It's always the easier solution to copy the
existing rather than think hard on a better solution nobody's done before.

~~~
anigbrowl
Up until the last year or two, you had to use a mouse to interact with music
software. Touchscreens existed, but were prohibitively expensive - the iPad is
beginning to change that. Indeed, it's only within the last 5 years that
processing multichannel audio hasn't hit the CPU so hard that the UI starts to
get choppy (preventing complex animations of what's going on in the signal).

You will see some interesting multitouch applications within the next few
years, but the real breakthrough will require some sort of 3d holographic
display. Truly interactive musical creation requires the same sort of open-
ended conceptual space as sculpture does.

------
kldavis4
Chrome should be all about making an application interface more intuitive to
users. A completely reductionist UI would be just having hotkeys, like vim,
but that makes it a lot harder for a new user to get started. I think the key
is to strike the right balance so that as users gain experience, the Chrome
doesn't hold them back.

~~~
ugh
What about users who like to use the mouse? I’m not sure whether keyboard
centric UIs are inherently superior to mouse-centric UIs.

~~~
jokermatt999
Unless we're discussing actual metrics, it seems like it's a matter of
preference.

Keyboard UIs (vim, pentadactyl, etc) should allow the user to do what they
want in as few keystrokes as possible. They allow the user to do things
_fast_. For people who want to take the time and effort to master an
interface, they're superior to mouse centric UIs. For people who want to be
able to sit down and use something right away without having to read a manual,
they're horrible. The discovery of such UIs consists of "RTFM".

Mouse centric UIs should be easier for people who haven't used the program
before. The functions should be fairly obviously labeled and easy to click on.
For those unfamiliar with the program, at least its basic functionality should
be immediately obvious. However, without some form of keyboard shortcut, they
tend to be slower and more frustrating for more experienced or technical users
who want to simply get stuff done.

All of this is just IMHO of course. I tend to prefer UIs that are essentially
not there. My Firefox consists of a pentadactyl command line/status bar, and
the TreeStyleTab sidebar. The browser UI is completely out of my way, and I
know how to do what I want with just the keyboard, mostly. However, when
people sit down and try to use my Firefox, they have no idea how the hell to
even begin. (Whether this is a bug or a feature is up to you. :)

------
ocharles
Can I just say as a musician who fully endorses modular synthesis (and is the
process of building his own physical modular synth) that Reason's design is
fantastic. That's the back side of the instruments, you don't really interact
with that much - only connecting various things which you don't really tweak.
On the other side, yes, the gear matches physical interfaces and each
instrument has a different interface. To me, that's the beauty of it! It
really keeps your creative juice flowing and you end up doing things _wrong_
and making mistakes, which unlocks all sorts of cool sounds.

Also, I don't really see the issue with Ultrabeat, for precisely the same
reason. I don't tend to use that, but that's just because a drum machine isn't
my workflow.

I think the author would have got his point across better if he wasn't using
creative software as his example.

------
toddmorey
His first argument is a functional one: surely computers can give us a better
way to manipulate audio than dragging around virtual patch cables. I totally
agree with that.

However, then he tries to pivot the argument towards modernistic design
sensibilities. Modern can be beautiful, but it can also be cold. And, like
tactile interfaces, it's not immune from the eventual fatigue of seeing it
everywhere.

In the end, the classic rule of form following function still applies. Make it
work, then make it beautiful. As long as they don't impede function, I welcome
the different looks and my occasional dose of nostalgia.

~~~
rgbrgb
I think the classic rule of form following function doesn't have to do with
doing one then the other. Rather, I believe it refers to the beauty of
something which is built to be highly functional (e.g. higher mathematics, the
piano, poetry(?)). In this case, aesthetics are functional.

~~~
toddmorey
I really like that integrated viewpoint. I'd always thought it to mean that
"form follows function" in order of priority (rather than chronologically in
development). But I really like the idea that beauty is the byproduct of
functionality. That's a new spin for me.

------
saturdaysaint
I think the examples here are poorly chosen - wouldn't it be more interesting
to compare the relatively chromey iOS interface to Windows Phone 7 (rather
than an archaic Logic plugin released in 2004)? If we're bringing up old audio
software, why not bring up Ableton Live, which has been on the forefront of
chromeless GUI design for nearly a decade?

Also, Android's Honeycomb interface shows us that "chromeless" doesn't
necessarily equal "flat".

------
teyc
There is a reason why forum software looks dated compared with commenting
system in blogs. Old style forum designs do too much work with the chrome.
Heavy, styled, boxes. It makes a design weighty and draws attention from the
content.

Ben Hunt called for "Design the content, not the box it comes in". More of
that over here <http://savethepixel.org/save_the_pixel_ch1.pdf>

------
sudonim
Software designers use visual metaphors to make software easier to use. One of
the reasons Apple has been so successful is their UI elements remind us of
things in the real world. Like the now popular on-off switch from iOS. That
could have easily been accomplished with a drop down or a checkbox, or radio
buttons... but the useful video metaphor lets the brain think less to use it.

So, I have to disagree with the author. Im not against using relevant visual
metaphors. Im against stupid ones (like the messy cables).

------
damoncali
Is this a "modest proposal" or an actual argument against usability?

~~~
derleth
It's religion. Laugh.

~~~
damoncali
Actually, it was an honest question. I've always assumed that metaphors were a
good thing in UI, and was surprised to see an argument against them.

The best writing is often found where you can't tell if the author was being
sarcastic, and to me, this read like that.

------
gcb
people still calls me crazy when i say the only thing GTK miss is an X skin,
with plain B&W flat buttons.

------
beefman
Cannot be upvoted enough.

