laikrodiz

There’s something I’d like to present today, but a little backstory first. I love music, perform live and have a bunch of musical hardware at home. Deluge was one of my latest purchases, as I loved the demos I’ve seen online and had a change to play around on Superbooth.

It also happens I lead a team of about 20 designers in an enterprise software development company. And even though I was really impressed by the functionality, there were a lot of things that drew my attention as a designer. Software design (same as hardware, I assume) is not only about things looking subjectively good or bad. These categories are actually rarely used in designer conversations. It’s much more about user experience, consistency, scalability, continuity, error prevention and other stuff, that can be backed by a set of rules or so called heuristics. The interpretation of these heuristics might be slightly subjective, but at least there’s something to build the conversation around other than personal taste.

I spent around a month recently meticulously going through Deluge manual, pushing Deluge buttons and working on the user experience review that I present you today. The result is a 61-page document split into several sections. It contains my notes on possible UI and UX possible improvements based on Nielsen’s Heuristics methodology.

The review is based on version 3.0.5. Some of the items had already been addressed in the latest betas, but I assume my thoughts may still be valuable in a way. I’m not hoping all of the proposed changes to be implemented, as there’s a long backlog already and some of the items may require a substantial code refactoring effort first. But at least the problem statements may spark new ideas and point out areas worth paying attention to.

A lot of the items might have already appeared on the forums as feature requests, but I still list them here as I consider them important and my proposed solution may be different. There are a lot of feature requests in my mind that I didn’t include, as they don’t derive from any specific UX problem. I may also be wrong about some of the problems statements, as I can't call myself a power user, rather a researcher at the moment.

So here it is, enjoy.

@amiga909 said:
wow, inspired work, thank you. very impressive. still reading thru. looks good, if u ask me, Synthstrom could hire u as a UX consultant
question: is it possible you got a lot of content from the suggestions on this forum, like http://forums.synthstrom.com/discussion/2240/100-top-rated-suggestions ? i see a lot of similarities. some ideas appear new to me, very nice. did u intend to formalize some of the “hot” topics here? if so, a very noble thing to do! for me reading thru it would help if there was a link to existing suggestion threads because i understood most problems u list already. i could try to help you with links if u want.

Thanks! Synthstrom has slightly different product philosophy, I guess. They have a vision, and it doesn't really include consultants That's fine. We all can only propose.

I haven't really read through items on the forum, as it would make me biased. The proper way to run a UX review is actually including at least three reviewers using the same methodology and see which of their findings match, so it's not a surprise, I've found something that has already been mentioned on the forums. The value in this case, I suppose, would be my view at solving the problem, as I have some expertise in the area.

Has the beta dropped? Or is this still pre-beta?
I see the link on the site — https://synthstromaudible.github.io/DelugeFirmware/