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Knobs and buttons and UI. What's best?

There has been a bit of talking about UI and knobs and what not in the Cality thread. Being a place where users and developers meet, I was thinking we could share some experiences about this. Maybe there is something developers can use.

Small sliders like the ones in Xynthesizr are difficult to adjust because the finger covers the values. Skram by Liine had a wonderful way of solving this (also used for their knobs too). See the picture or this video

@brambos prefers directional buttons. Perfect of accurate control. However with long range values (anything more than 10, plenty of them in his apps) there is the risk of the "Space Invaders" syndrome (or the woodpecker, choose the disease according to your preferences): tap-tap-tap-tap-tap...

Atom piano roll has a great UX solution for this: in Factor & BPM you can both slide (for moving fast) and tap (for precision). The same goes in AUM (BPM) and surely in other apps too.

Sliding of course has its limitations too, namely the edges of the screen. I can't recall the app now but I remember trying to slide to the right on a control that was on the top right corner of the screen. Needless to say that neither the table nor my leg have the same reactivity as the iPad screen.

I love AUM's sliders, thick and solid, but I hate sweeping in search of that channel... Apesoft has a nice feature to calibrate the speed of its sliders.

A single button to conceal a list of choices, like Roseta arp (do you want up or down or up-down or...? How many choices do you have? Have you gone through them all?); or a knob for the scales and scale degrees in Autony. Here Xynthesizr is the king: you could draw a bass line and make chord changes on the fly.

One of the things I like most is to see how certain standards are created, like double-tapping to reset to default position. It really surprises me every time I find an app that doesn't follow this.

Comments

  • It's one of those things that can kill a great product. Much as I love Odyssei, it's sliders are near impossible to dial in accurate values. And as for the flicking gesture for moving in small increments that's even more horrendous. I had to create myself a Max for Live device so I could speed up programming sessions with Odyssei, it's that bad. How people manage with the Lexington UI in Gadget is beyond me!

    I think all dials/sliders should have a double tap to enter a manual value option. That's often the fastest way to work.

    I'm also fond of 'shift' key functions to change dial/slider values to inc/dec in finer values. Moog Model 15 has an interesting variation on this idea. When you want fine value changes, you place a second finger down beside the finger on the dial and you're automatically in fine inc/dec mode.

    Dials/sliders that react to the speed of interaction are great too. Fast slides = larges values jumps, slow slides = fine value changes.

    Worst-case scenario, rotary dials with a rotary interaction model are a passable option for accuracy as the further your finger/stylus is from the rotary dial you're currently controlling, the more precise you're able to be. But this interaction model is terrible for rotary dials positioned on the perimeter of a tablet interface. Being blunt, it's the sort of interaction model that should have been outlawed with gen 1 VST's...

    Any dial/slider with more than 30 possible values should have a way to dial in at a finer grain and/or a double tap interaction to enter a value manually. The value of 30 is arbitrary and isn't something based on some form of heuristic evaluation, but it seems like a reasonable value to me, having done a fair bit of fingering in my time - apologies for the plagiarism Jakob! :)

  • @jonmoore said:
    It's one of those things that can kill a great product. Much as I love Odyssei, it's sliders are near impossible to dial in accurate values. And as for the flicking gesture for moving in small increments that's even more horrendous. I had to create myself a Max for Live device so I could speed up programming sessions with Odyssei, it's that bad. How people manage with the Lexington UI in Gadget is beyond me!

    I think all dials/sliders should have a double tap to enter a manual value option. That's often the fastest way to work.

    I'm also fond of 'shift' key functions to change dial/slider values to inc/dec in finer values. Moog Model 15 has an interesting variation on this idea. When you want fine value changes, you place a second finger down beside the finger on the dial and you're automatically in fine inc/dec mode.

    Dials/sliders that react to the speed of interaction are great too. Fast slides = larges values jumps, slow slides = fine value changes.

    Worst-case scenario, rotary dials with a rotary interaction model are a passable option for accuracy as the further your finger/stylus is from the rotary dial you're currently controlling, the more precise you're able to be. But this interaction model is terrible for rotary dials positioned on the perimeter of a tablet interface. Being blunt, it's the sort of interaction model that should have been outlawed with gen 1 VST's...

    Any dial/slider with more than 30 possible values should have a way to dial in at a finer grain and/or a double tap interaction to enter a value manually. The value of 30 is arbitrary and isn't something based on some form of heuristic evaluation, but it seems like a reasonable value to me, having done a fair bit of fingering in my time - apologies for the plagiarism Jakob! :)

    Good points. However, double-tap behavior on a slider/knob should be to reset the value back to its default.

    Maybe triple tap or long-tap (this might result in moving the control a bit and the dev should sense the intended gesture) to edit its value manually.

    Even sliders could have fine adjustments by moving the finger away from it - similar to knobs.

  • edited April 2019

    @MobileMusic said:
    Good points. However, double-tap behavior on a slider/knob should be to reset the value back to its default.

    Maybe triple tap or long-tap (this might result in moving the control a bit and the dev should sense the intended gesture) to edit its value manually.

    I always find this funny... why not a totally vanilla SINGLE-TAP to enter value? XUI (UI library used in Xequence) has been like this forever and I haven't got a single complaint about it so far?

  • edited April 2019

    @SevenSystems said:

    @MobileMusid:
    Good points. However, double-tap behavior on a slider/knob should be to reset the value back to its default.

    Maybe triple tap or long-tap (this might result in moving the control a bit and the dev should sense the intended gesture) to edit its value manually.

    I always find this funny... why not a totally vanilla SINGLE-TAP to enter value?

    Because the difference in duration between a single-tap and a touch is arbitrary, but multi-tap is unambiguous :)

  • @MobileMusic said:

    @jonmoore said:
    It's one of those things that can kill a great product. Much as I love Odyssei, it's sliders are near impossible to dial in accurate values. And as for the flicking gesture for moving in small increments that's even more horrendous. I had to create myself a Max for Live device so I could speed up programming sessions with Odyssei, it's that bad. How people manage with the Lexington UI in Gadget is beyond me!

    I think all dials/sliders should have a double tap to enter a manual value option. That's often the fastest way to work.

    I'm also fond of 'shift' key functions to change dial/slider values to inc/dec in finer values. Moog Model 15 has an interesting variation on this idea. When you want fine value changes, you place a second finger down beside the finger on the dial and you're automatically in fine inc/dec mode.

    Dials/sliders that react to the speed of interaction are great too. Fast slides = larges values jumps, slow slides = fine value changes.

    Worst-case scenario, rotary dials with a rotary interaction model are a passable option for accuracy as the further your finger/stylus is from the rotary dial you're currently controlling, the more precise you're able to be. But this interaction model is terrible for rotary dials positioned on the perimeter of a tablet interface. Being blunt, it's the sort of interaction model that should have been outlawed with gen 1 VST's...

    Any dial/slider with more than 30 possible values should have a way to dial in at a finer grain and/or a double tap interaction to enter a value manually. The value of 30 is arbitrary and isn't something based on some form of heuristic evaluation, but it seems like a reasonable value to me, having done a fair bit of fingering in my time - apologies for the plagiarism Jakob! :)

    Good points. However, double-tap behavior on a slider/knob should be to reset the value back to its default.

    Maybe triple tap or long-tap (this might result in moving the control a bit and the dev should sense the intended gesture) to edit its value manually.

    Agreed. Double tap to reset probably is the standard convention for plugins and apps, although lots do use it to enter values manually too.

    Long taps can work as an alternative but I also like single taps as dials/sliders are slide interactions (by definition), so single tap gestures don't often trigger an unwanted result. Tap and hold can become a PITA if you have to use them too often in a short period of time.

  • edited April 2019

    @brambos said:

    @SevenSystems said:

    @MobileMusid:
    Good points. However, double-tap behavior on a slider/knob should be to reset the value back to its default.

    Maybe triple tap or long-tap (this might result in moving the control a bit and the dev should sense the intended gesture) to edit its value manually.

    I always find this funny... why not a totally vanilla SINGLE-TAP to enter value?

    Because the difference in duration between a single-tap and a touch is arbitrary, but multi-tap is unambiguous :)

    I have had very positive experience with single-tap vs. move handling in XUI... not a lot of ambiguity problems. You just need to fine-tune all the movement thresholds / delays etc. really well :)

  • edited April 2019

    Or we could have Config settings for single tap, double tap, triple tap, long tap, etc. for editing the value, resetting the value, etc. so users can set their own preferences dynamically :smile:

  • I don’t see it used very often, but for knobs / dials I’m a huge fan of LayR’s approach to fine tuning. Vertical slide for broad increments; horizontal slide for fine tuning.

  • edited April 2019

    @jonmoore said:
    It's one of those things that can kill a great product. Much as I love Odyssei, it's sliders are near impossible to dial in accurate values. And as for the flicking gesture for moving in small increments that's even more horrendous. I had to create myself a Max for Live device so I could speed up programming sessions with Odyssei, it's that bad. How people manage with the Lexington UI in Gadget is beyond me!

    I deal with it by using the 3x Accessibility Zoom setting (double-tap on screen with three fingers and pan using three fingers), no joke :/

  • @rs2000 said:

    @jonmoore said:
    It's one of those things that can kill a great product. Much as I love Odyssei, it's sliders are near impossible to dial in accurate values. And as for the flicking gesture for moving in small increments that's even more horrendous. I had to create myself a Max for Live device so I could speed up programming sessions with Odyssei, it's that bad. How people manage with the Lexington UI in Gadget is beyond me!

    I deal with it by using the 3x Accessibility Zoom setting (double-tap on screen with three fingers and pan using three fingers), no joke :/

    And rather crafty solution it is too. I approve! :)

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