Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius

sibelius is truly revolutionary in the sense that no matter how carefully you try to work with it it always seems to be trying to rise up against you it's hard to learn poorly maintained and sports a navigation system that seems to take pride in putting things read at least expect them and that's going to be our design focus for this video the subtleties of designing a navigation for a complex program and disclaimer although this will initially start like a pretty down-to-earth reasonable design analysis like my last video about propeller heads reason Sibelius has a particularly unique ability to drive me actually insane so I'll keep it together as long as I can but don't be surprised if I go slightly off the rails at some point you have been warned so in case you're new to this channel I'm a composer and also a software designer which is why I find Sibelius particularly frustrating since it's got some genius functionality in there that I make use of on a daily basis but which is obstructed from flourishing by its bafflingly haphazard design so what's wrong with it and how did it get this way so Sibelius was created by twin brothers Ben and Jonathan Finn that's them there outside King's College at Cambridge where they grew up at the age of 17 they began working on a software engraving tool as a side project which after a few years of refining with encouragement from the composer Peter Maxwell Davies they decided to publish under the company name Sibelius software the emerge to the famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was chosen as a sort of oblique play on words I mean why not when released it began to spread through word-of-mouth to composers throughout Britain many of whom were trying out this type of software for the first time it was originally created to work on the Acorn computer which had become popular in the education space something that would become a competitive advantage for Sibelius later on its rivals at the time included score where he had to type rows of pitches and time values into a toss like interface in order to see a visual result which was massively time-consuming and another program finale which is still being used today but which isn't very good and so Sibelius due to being comparatively easy to use unfilled with superior features became the dominant notation software quite an accomplishment for a pair of obscure first time developers however over time the application became more complicated and as features began to multiply the existing navigation expanded and sure number of buttons and menus became overwhelming as the longtime Sibelius employee Daniel spread burry observed Sibelius has become a very sophisticated program with many hundreds of features and longtime users cannot easily comprehend what it's like to see it for the first time let alone tried to figure out how to use it so to try and solve this problem Sibelius looked to another creation app which had faced a similar buildup of functionality Microsoft Word here's a clip of the designer Jensen Harris who worked on Word for years describing the problems they faced while designing it we added new features to the product every version but honestly hardly anyone found them office seemed increasingly complicated one word we found started being talked about with office every time the press wrote a story about office and that word was blue he then goes on to describe how they began trying to reduce complexity on the screen and so the first of the features that we did to reduce the perception of bloat was something called Intelli menus instead of actually reducing the complexity of the product well we could hide some of it from you so what we do is we would take a random set of menu items and we would hide them which turned out to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy since people don't tend to click on options they can't see right in front of them so we'll come back to this in a minute let's get back to Sibelius software whoo to complicate matters during the development of Sibelius six sold it to the American multimedia company avid avid or a very mixed bag on the one hand you have their flagship app Media Composer which is an unpleasant power-hungry beast of an editing application that only runs on high-end machines that is if you can figure out how its controls work and on the other hand you have Pro Tools a solid easy to use audio workstation that avid bought in 1993 and so under this new ownership Sibelius six gave way to Sibelius 7 where okay before I go any further discussing the design of Sibelius 7 it is tempting to lay the blame for the bad parts solidly at Avid's door but I think we need to be careful not to buy into that narrative too much since the Sibelius design team were largely in place when seven came out and some of its oldest designers were pretty vocal in defending it so what do they do well let's again return to Jensen Harris to hear how they tackled this problem with Mike soft word which was to create a new design pattern called the ribbon which I'm sure you're all familiar with the idea of the ribbon is not just to make stuff easier to find but also to give a good indication of what the feature in question will actually do before you click on it we also have something throughout the UI which is called live preview which says at any time you hover over a formatting choice we'll show you exactly what it looks like so what I'm going to do is use the position gallery which again just shows you the most common places that people want to put pictures in in their documents I'll split the text into columns I'll just choose columns two and two go a little bit beyond this presentation let's have a look at the improvements that led us to where the ribbon is today this is word online where the visuals have been further decluttered and where options still give a clear visual indication of what's going to happen when you click on them not to mention they now have a search function which can be a nice way of asking the program to initiate a command like spell checking without needing to find the button in question notice also that the labels are pretty clear insert that's where you insert things layout that's where you see options for margins and spacing and stuff this is what the ribbon is meant to be clear and easy to use now when Sibelius licensed the ribbon pattern from Microsoft they got a lot of criticism for it with the general attitude being that it was the wrong system to use my own feeling is that the ribbon was a perfectly fine choice but that Sibelius made really terrible use of it and by not designing the ribbon well it's had a knock-on effect on other parts of the app too the best way to illustrate all of this is to see it in context so let's imagine ourselves to be a first-time user trying to achieve something really basic I'm using version eight by the way but the navigation is nearly identical to seven okay are you ready for the pain so after you've loaded up the app you're presented with a bunch of presets and right off the bat there's a slightly absurd visual contradiction a category titled no category this contains the only option anyone actually cares about blank page or if not you can scroll through the other sixty-six presets to find what you want by the way I know the solo piano is the very last option really solo piano gets bottom billing below mariachi band and loose tablature well okay and then in the spot where most apps have a create or confirm button they've opted comically for quit Sibelius I just love this it's a if they're saying you've already seen the no category thing trust us it only goes downhill from here so anyway you click on blank page ignore the presets I mean that's what everyone does right I mean if there's anyone out there who actually bothers with the screen could could you let me know and so then you go down Oh oops almost got me okay let's just do a little design pass on this yep you go these exist already let's get rid of those yeah that'll do fine okay now we're brought to the home tab so with the ribbon design home is meant to be where you find the core actions people use all the time you know to avoid having to click around too much in Word that'll be things like font size styling etc in Sibelius I think there are only about four functionalities here I'd consider primary along with the smattering of random stuff that will be better suited elsewhere you'll see what I mean in a second so if we want to make music we need some instruments right well thankfully that at least is here in the Home tab where it should be although I always have to double check to make sure it's the right button because the trumpet keeps throwing me and the incomplete title add or remove requires a pause to understand I'd remove one oh I guess it says instruments down there to the right but that's not really how eyes work okay considering that this might be the most important button in the app let's call it add or remove instrument I think it deserves to space you know you've got a button over here called reavoice chord diagram and because it looks a little bit like an ADD removed trumpet button let's make it generic by changing the icon to a plus like everyone else does okay so let's choose to add an instrument and now we're faced with this eyesore this is the real heart of Sibelius endless horrible dialog boxes and even though this is one of the better ones the sloppy attention to detail is everywhere so the idea is you choose instruments from here and put them here to add them to your score and because the list of so big they gave us a search bar to make it easier to find stuff that's useful so let's find a cello really you can't locate cello oh I guess I need to remember the full name VL on cello that no one uses ok well let's add a guitar no that's helpful we've all this space available to us but the drop down is teeny so we can't see what the options are you're on version 8 and you haven't fixed this yet but even if it had been big enough you still wouldn't been able to find a useful result because putting in guitar isn't enough to get the two most common types you need to actually type acoustic or electric first because this is search from the early 90s can I have that quit Sibelius button back please oh thank you so let's add a piano to the score now understanding what each of the elements does is a little bit of a trial and error affair for example the Add button relates to this but the delete button relates to this I look at the tick box all the way down here small staff okay you select it and get zero feedback and after clicking around a bit you realized that it's contextual either on or off for the instrument you've selected okay a little design fix for free um when you click on the instrument just put the tick box here so let's add a stave to the piano oh look I can't delete it now it's busted anyway now we have our instruments so a typical next step might be to set a tempo marking tempo is pretty important so it should be in home right nope no you need to navigate to a tab called text that's intuitive then you need to look in a drop-down titled styles uh-huh and when you do that you see there's a whole range of things in here different types of markings techniques expressions oh I get it all these things are written as text that's why they're being categorized that way even though some of them don't contain text oh and I love how there's a category called common yet before you open it they only show the first two options hey guys I'm fairly certain tempo is more common than the direction to pluck your strings but as if that wasn't painful enough what's coming up next is just pure madness and any first-time user would be forgiven for completely losing the plot here so you click on tempo and your arrow turns a nearly indistinguishable shade of blue which when you finally notice it indicates that something going to happen okay so let's click with our special blue arrow right okay it wants us to enter text oh I get it now we type tempo equals 120 or something oh it's not working and our note duration is missing so here's what you should have done you need to click the drop-down pick the tempo click with the special blue arrow see the insertion point and then right click to trigger a massive drop-down containing a bazillion options and there we go the words tempo right so we click on that and finally oh man the note values still isn't there no you need to now right-click again open up the ludicrously large drop-down again select the note value and then finally type your tempo oh and by the way it's really easy to accidentally deselect this whole thing so you may have to do this multiple times worthy of Finlandia okay let's do a quick fix how about you go to home where a vital function like tempo should be and when you select it you get a ghost beside your cursor which you can place an edit immediately you're welcome Sibelius I just massively improved your app but this type of fix doesn't repair the larger structural issues which is the extreme messiness and inconsistency for example there's a category called note input which apart from one or two specific input type functions contains options that could just as easily belong in the next category called notations this takes a long time to learn especially since each one is maxed out with unnecessary detail so for those who say the ribbon was a bad choice I'm not really in agreement because this isn't how a ribbon is meant to work it's just a higgledy-piggledy launchpad for ever more horrendous pop-ups I mean look at this one what on earth does this do oh my head is beginning to hurt I mean look at this category called layout it's definitely the most appropriately named but which is undermined by the next one called appearance layout and appearance hmm you want to edit the staff spacing because it says staff spacing there then you have to click on this ENC little button to get a monster terminal called engraving rules yeah what what and then there's hundreds of disparate settings with no visual cues to help you know what effect anything is going to have it's just a parameter dump perpetrated by some dev who probably assumed that a designer will clean it up at some point in the future using it as an absolute nightmare trust me even finale with all its problems and it's gone many does a better job of this at least giving you some indication of what's going to happen but even if they included this information you'll still find that the thing you want is in some other dialog box I mean let's just move over to the appearance tab and click the eensy design and position button and oh no another endless list of crazy options what about instrument names oh no we're back to that engraving rules dialog box again the same dialog triggered from two different menus that have titles which are basically synonymous with each other have you ever heard of Maura Spratt look up Maura Spratt and watches 80s Star Wars commercial for Quinn's worth it's pretty good $6.99 here's another one imagine you've just plugged in an external sound unit into your computer as many many people do and like every other audio app in the world you'd probably want to easy access to allow you to switch to that device right well okay I'm going to roll up this ribbon and you tell me or you'd look to find that option press pause and take all the time you need okay we ready was your answer in the play category no I'm not surprised but that's where it is don't worry though the test isn't over where do you think we go now hmm did you say configuration congratulations that was the right answer but but no you're wrong it's in this little NC button down here but we're not quite there because first they show you a bunch of audio sampler settings and then you need to figure out to look in the last place anyone ever would write at the bottom left where we could finally see audio engine options there we go rollin rollin rollin why can't they do a pass and how things are structured starting with the tab names I mean if you look at another program called derecho you can see how easy it can be they have one category called write that contains all the things you need to actually write the notes in your score and another one called engrave which allows you to edit the appearance of everything you've written and look at the engraving rules work they appear under the actual score so you can see the result of the changes you've made why do dialog boxes when you can do this oh man I guess I just mentioned Doric Oh didn't I well I guess I'm gonna have to talk about the event then okay real quick after avid bought Sibelius they went through a corporate restructuring selling off assets and laying off some of their employees and as part of this they decided quite bafflingly to stop supporting Sibelius while firing the entire London team here's a picture of the Sibelius office in Finsbury Park taken by an employee before they closed the doors for good so because Sibelius is a widely used application there was a very large and widely covered public outcry Ben and Jonathan Finn stepped in to try and buy it back again but were rebuffed and in 2014 as sher performance was tumbling they altered course an an seem that they were actually going to support Sibelius after all only now they had to build a new team from scratch because Steinberg who make the excellent Cubase had already rehired most of the original Sibelius team putting them to work on a direct competitor called Darko so when I make comparisons between Sibelius and Darko to a certain extent I'm comparing what Sibelius is to what Sibelius could have been but it's not like the current Sibelius team can't make changes avid may not be responsible for Sibelius 7 but you can bet that they're responsible for not improving it at all ever since I mean they've made it compatible with Tablet great now it can annoy me on tablet and they've added a timeline so we can see the same information twice amazing an extra window I need to close before beginning a new project fix the bugs stop a crashing all the time fix the bugs make it easier to find things by the way if you look down to where the quit Sibelius button is on this page you'll see a like button beside it press time oh and press that too oh yeah god I forgot to mention the search system it's called finding ribbon remember earlier I said that in word online if you search for something like word count it's useful because you can just do it right there well guess what Sibelius does you enter what you're looking for like I want to create a page break and rather than act as a shortcut it instead drags you over to the place on the ribbon where that button can be found and highlights it for you thanks a lot it's like the app is annoyed at you for not understanding it like a passive-aggressive child it's over here idiot the black beams can stretch they can stretch really high so Sibelius has lots of plugins which are essentially bug fixes by people sick of waiting for avid to make proper improvements but for some reason each category has its own plug-in button so you have to keep opening each individual plug-in folder to find whatever it is you want this is a solved problem can we just have one place for plugins please why would you do this you ever mix up elizabeth Olsen with the the Olsen twins for a while I thought she was like the brakeaway twin even though I knew their names were mary-kate and Ashley and her name is Elizabeth hold on what does Wikipedia say oh right she's hurt she's their younger sister oh that makes sense they have this horrible drop-down with a million eye and some of them are really really important like for example I'm looking for these guitar string icons and I can never find them at all of this what should I review next comment and tell me he careful when turning the pancakes you dropped them and they have to go on the bin do you hear me lieutenant uhura pay attention I want clean pancakes this time oh that's handy why when you select these buttons do they look like half filled barrels of urine choose nicer colors the purple Guren combo isn't doing it for me let's take a hairpin and stretch it to the next page oh look hairpins busted page no the way in classical music you need to give part scores to each musician where would any sane person put the options to see the part scores surely not hidden away here up behind this plus icon the plus icon universally understood to mean add something oh man they are here why would you use this to mean part score answer me sometimes things become melty the cheese melts in the microwave the music melts and super loose you use the tempo slider to quickly change the tempo and then Sibelius keeps resetting it Oh No tempos busted cheese melts amber yellow but the Sibelius melts red the music is bleeding I bring up the drop down but it's filled with gone why is everything so misaligned and crooked look at this line it up why won't you just line it up it's almost like the position of things was decided by the roll of a dice this app should be called Morton Feldman you know the way you try to convey vital information by making the arrow a subtle shade of blue you know how hard that is to see do you know how many accessibility guidelines are breaking there if Beethoven was alive today Sibelius would be preventing him from being a composer it keeps flowing frogman's yeast just added to the mix and half baked to perfection just press that button come get your button I want to save a video so I go to file export video change all the terrible default settings and choose a location to save it in you know at the end of the day I think they did a great job they are accredited to themselves then I I need to tweak something so I go back to the score for a second when I come back all my settings are discarded I have to specify the location again every time remember my settings keys remember my settings remember anything Amara see are losing the enthusiasm open file Sibelius crashed save file Sibelius crushed copy notes Sibelius crushed playscore Sibelius crashed quit Sibelius Sibelius crashed open Sibelius the Sibelius crashed read email subscribe grind to the gore Sibelius crashed Sibelius crashed through my long nursery nights he stood by my bed and weary loomed gigantic formless queer purring in my haunted ear but saying hideous nightmare thing and talking as he lapped my blood in a voice cool and flat saying forever Sibelius crashed Sibelius crashed crashed [Music] John Ben Jerry you make a mean chunky monkey but your sibelius tastes funky anyone else feel tired I do I think I need to leave I just need I just need the exit there it is and if you like dr. Rome feel I feel I feel like sure sure

Channel: Tantacrul

Views: 1,173,300

Rating: 4.9568324 out of 5

Keywords: sibelius (software), music education (field of study), finale (software), Tantacrul, User experience design, avid technology (business operation), music notation software (software genre), music (industry), music software, interface design, sibelius software orchestra, sibelius software opening music, awful interface design, awful design, bad design, UX Design, ux design principles, ui design principles, UI Design, avid sibelius, sibelius software review

Id: dKx1wnXClcI

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/t-muns]

This is such a great video. Despite me knowing nothing about Sibelius, the design flaws were communicated so well that I didn't feel like I needed to. I would love to see more critique videos about software design from Tantacrul

[u/by_the_bayou]

I had to write a song on Sibelius in college..... fuuuuuck that assignment. That software is so fucking annoying to use. Just gimme a damn piano roll!

[u/kyle787]

This is the perfect example of why designing and developing software is so difficult. Programmers and musicians are similar in that they require intimate knowledge to master their subject. However, there isn’t exactly overlap in the pool of people that program or play music professionally. This means you end up with people that are writing software for something they won’t use. So while you may end up with a super clean and professional looking product that implements all the requested features, it doesn’t effectively solve the problem for the end user.

[u/TheToyBox]

To be fair, the design of Sibelius is horrifyingly god-awful, but... I don't know what's more upsetting - how hard it is to use, or that its output ends up being so beautiful and superior that it's worth it and you know you gotta keep coming back to it like it's an abusive billionaire with a shoe fetish.

Also, Finale print-outs can go fuck themselves. Might as well be a screen grab of the midi display in a 1990's windows midi sequencer.

[u/thx1138a]

This guy seems like a very, very good UI designer.

[u/BaZing3]

It's like if Mr. Plinkett got into music composition instead of movie reviews.

[u/impunity]

only use guitar pro 5.

[u/CitizenTed]

I worked for an audio software distributor back in the early 00's. Fortunately, I only had to support installation and audio setup. The actual functionality was supported by Sibelius. In those years I got very familiar with Steinberg, FL, Cakewalk, Reason, Arturia, etc. I loved them all. But Sibelius? Fuck that program. Seriously. What a shitshow.

[u/commodore_kierkepwn]

Things like this fascinate me and it shows you where the truly educated (as in schooled, not necessarily "smart" because "smart" doesn't have an objective standard). Like the people who know how to code go and get their PhD in Medical Biotechnology and then get an MD and become a brain surgeon, and then they use all of that technical training together, synthesized into the next remote surgical equipment and its code or something else spectacular but requires knowledge from different subsets.

Or you can just hire people that individually specialize and manage them, and you get your average shit.

Then you have the worlds of coding, graphic art, organizational psychology, and music required to make this app. No one makes a double major out of compsci and music.