Enable Usability

In my spare time, I’m a bit of music producer. In the late 80s and early 90s, many fantastic synthesizers were available on the market – the digital synth had come of age. My synthesizer was beautiful – it had an audio capability that was simply unrivaled. The sounds that one could make were amazing lashings of sonic delight.

My synth – wonderful sounds, awful interface

Despite my synthesizer’s audio capabilities, I never really programmed many of my own sounds because of the interface - it was all digital. To make things “simpler,” manufacturers cut back on the knobs, sliders and switches that adorned the old school instruments. Instead, they replaced the analog interfaces with buttons and small LCD screens. Features that were essential to sculpting audio were hidden behind menus, sub menus and sub-sub menus. Elements of a sound’s dynamic could only be changed one at a time – and that’s only if you could remember under which sequence of buttons the function resided. Think of it like this: you had hundreds of ways to alter and program a sound – but only fifteen buttons to do it with.

Modern synth – old school interface, 100% usable

There was an obvious usability issue here. So, in the mid-nineties, manufacturers started to build cutting-edge digital synthesizers with analog shells in an effort to make programming an audio landscape more hands-on. “Controller” keyboards started to spring up - keyboards that couldn’t produce sounds by themselves, but would act as an interface for another keyboard thus allowing the essential sound parameters to be tweaked using the knobs and sliders of the controller keyboard, not the menus and sub-menus of the slave digital synthesizer.

Controllers are even more important now. The advancement of the microchip and computer technology now means that traditional synthesizer hardware (i.e. the whole unit) can be boiled down to a piece of software that you can load on your computer. The computer screen does act as a decent interface as you can visually see many parameters at once – but it’s still hard to control. By hooking up a relatively cheap controller keyboard to your computer, it creates the illusion that you are playing a fully fledged analog interfaced synthesizer.

Thinking about websites, designers need to always be aware that no matter how complex or simple there website is, the only controller that their users will use is a mouse and, most frequently, the left mouse button. Sometimes users will have to use the keyboard, but the primary navigation is just a little piece of plastic that fits in the palm of the hand.

Musicians learn to use their equipment inside out – they study user manuals, musician forums and, spend hours and hours experimenting. Website users are the exact opposite. They must be able to use almost every single website out there with no prior education or instruction.