I know a fair number of Germans and there is not one of them that would nuke their product/source of income rather than listen to their customers. Generalisations do add a certain drama though, however incorrect.
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So true.
I also wonder how did this atrocity of a GUI got approved and passed through the betatesters. To me it looks like some kind of sabotage.
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Thatās sort of how I felt when I bought Nuendo. There were no clear images of their UI on the website. When I installed and tried the software, I completely, sincerely thought it was the wrong software. I thought, āThis costs several hundred dollars and yet this software looks ancient. This canāt be right.ā And here we areā¦
I had been hoping these new updates would resolve some things but Iām not at all confident Steinberg either has a UX/UI team or that they listen to their UX/UI team.
The fact that they increased their flat design in v13 suggests that they didnāt study a topic that has been in the public for several years: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/
I teach this subject. I have to communicate to students the problems and limits of pure flat design. Then to see a major company fall into this trap in 2023ā¦ Iām left baffled. Not sure where Steinberg is going with this.
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From that article, I think it sums it up well. Not so much the specific sentence but how the obvious just gets ignored in favour of trend.
āBut just because users are better at detecting linked elements doesnāt mean they donāt need any clues at all. In fact, weāve noticed that long-term exposure to these flat yet clickable elements has been slowly reducing user efficiency by complicating their understanding of whatās clickable and what isnāt.ā
Iām mostly looking forward to maybe something like flat design 5.0 ānow with 3Dā when they realise they had it right the first time round 
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Thanks for taking the time to read it. Itās been difficult convincing people to consider these details. Thereās a strong misconception that this topic is only about aesthetic qualities. For those who are comfortable with flat design, they assume any critique against it is arbitrary.
Does anyone in here know any status on these 448 comments about the design problems?
I would expect that Steinberg read this and take notes? Thatās what I would do to make things easier to understand what to solve and such.
Anyone?
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It was an interesting read and I agree with it fully.
This is my experience. People think Iām just stuck in the past and generally refuse to accept the modern look. Yes, I tend to prefer the 90s GUIs but for no other reason than they were mostly practical to use and everything was far more intuitive.
I think some of this is maybe my impatience with it all. I usually work quite fast and hate anything that involves clicking and browsing through countless sub-menus unnecessarily. Modern designs, apart from being flat, borderless and very little colour separation, tend to make many things require more clicks than before. I use lots of shortcuts and the common response is āwhatās the problem, just assign a shortcutā - thatās fine if you can remember them all, my brain is already crammed full with them
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From what Iāve read, two things:-
SB have acknowledged that they are looking into making adjustments to bring better āreadabilityā to the UI. Confirmation the Control Room UI (MixConsole) unfortunately couldnāt get included in this round of design updates (time constraints); it will be addressed in a later release.
Beyond that, Iām guessing, lots of effort/attention being put into more pressing fixing of crashes/stability, bugs, broken behaviour (bringing back Beat Calculator.!), etcā¦ And to consider all the reports from over in Nuendo land tooā¦
However as youād expect, no specific details given (Iāve seen).
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Alright. Thanks a lot.
Thatās wierd. Why would they exclude beat calculator from V.13? That donāt make any sense since so many people mix and masters songs with cubase without info about BPM.
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Where, may I ask?
There do not appear to be any representatives participating in the Cubase forum, unlike the Dorico one where they are very engaged. Would that they were.
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I think I read it from SB over on the Nuendo forums somewhereā¦ in the big N13 thread there perhaps.?
For the record, I have seen a number of responses and engagement from various SB staff, popping in to different Cubase forum topics here over the last weeks. Tells me they are actively reading and taking note/answering where they canā¦
Youāre probably thinking of this post:
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Yes.! Thank you @David_W thatās exactly the one I had in mindā¦
But isnāt that only referring to Nuendo?
Would be nice if the popped in here, given the nearly 500 posts. One can only hope, one day. Thanks anyway.
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Nuendo is effectively a superset of Cubase Pro; design changes in Nuendo are likely to affect Cubase and vice versa.
I canāt even begin to address the ātask flowsā involved in their software. It does often require MANY steps in order to achieve goals.
But the question Iād like to ask is why do Steinberg change the GUI so often. It admits that at no point they feel its EVER right.
By contrast Dorico 5 has not changed itās look and feel very much in cmparison n 5 full iterations.
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Steinberg should publish a small free tool, a .srf to .png converter and back.
That way, many of the complaints could be addressed by simply converting the /Applications/Cubase 13.app/Contents/Skins/skin.srf file to PNG, editing it in Photoshop or Affinity Photo or similar program, and the program could have an importer to choose the edited PNG and put it back in that path, previously backing up the original, to avoid any issues.
Steinberg could also setup a āskinā repository with no more than 50 files, and inspect skin submissions before they go there, so we donāt have a Windows skin type list with flowers, or the whole skin in pastel pink or other insults to good taste like that.
That would work great for both us and them. Weād be able to change a few things (honestly in my case Iād just change the track headers, the rest of the new GUI doesnāt get on my nerves so much even if I think a lot of things can be improved), and they would get for free great ideas for the GUI, so it would be a win win.
Dont know about skins but how about sorting the GUI and not changing it radically for next 4 iterations!
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I donāt know why they have changed it so much or as often as they have. Iāve only used their software since 2021.
I would guess that they have very different teams working on Dorico compared to Cubase. I would also guess that the codebase for Cubase is also much more difficult to work with and this could contribute to this possibility that very different teams are involved.
Itās probably important to realize that any meaningful changes that need to be made to Cubase are ten times more difficult than making changes in Dorico (side note: this is why I am in favor of a subscription plan for Cubase. They need more work to resolve things which requires more money).
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