Everything about Cubase’s UI just keeps getting worse. I just upgraded to 15 after a couple of years absence due to family matters. 13 was just completely broken. I am already closing the Project window by mistake thinking it is the Mix console window because mixconsole basically doesn’t work in a smaller window mode as the pinned tracks become invisible, forcing mixconsole to be full screen. The contrast when selecting a channel makes everything within that channel impossible to see. Grid lines are overly contrasted by default. Fonts too small on almost everything. The whole thing is just horrible by default. Why can’t Steinberg hire UI guys who know what they are doing?
Not true at all.
There haven’t been any major changes to the MixConsole layout over the past 5+ releases. If you’re actually mixing tracks and want to see what you’re doing, of course it’s easier to do in fullscreen or in the lower pane. You can adjust the width of the strips if not enough of them are visible.
Maybe you need to calibrate your monitor and/or choose different colors for the strips.
If the defaults aren’t working for you, why not change the settings? It’s not like you have to do it every time you start a project.
I’m pretty sure you can adjust application scaling in the preferences.
When I get in someone else’s car to drive, I don’t wonder why the default settings of the seats, mirrors and entertainment system are so “poorly designed.”
Cubase isn’t an iPad app. Expecting it to look exactly how you want without zero effort is a bit unreasonable.
The UI guys aren’t the problem. You’re the user–and you have an interface. Use it to make the software do what you want it to do.
You have to adjust it, this is the only way. It also strongly depends on the monitor, resolution etc. It looks fine on some monitora on default while absolutely eye-sore on the others.
You can find a few very long topics here, where people are complaining at the state of current GUI. Enjoy the reading 
As I work in the game dev, I can see some similarities between the Cubase interface and the video game demos, where graphics were made by solo programmers. Not only the visuals but also priority/usability/location of the buttons, windows etc.
Hit F3 to open/close the mixer window
The Mix Console got a pretty major GUI change, along with everything else, in v13.
It’s not possible to only change the font size. It’s not that everything is too small.
I beg to differ. In this day and age there is plenty of science behind what makes a GUI work and feel intuitive to use. It isn’t all personal preference.
No changes that are relevant to OP’s issues. It’s still just a window with faders and knobs that works better in a large window or full screen. What would a Mix Console that works “in a smaller window mode” even look like?
If you change the font size, you also have to change the size of the containers which are displaying the text–or you’ll just have clipped text and a broken-looking interface.
>>>In my humble opinion<<<, the word “intuitive” is being thrown around quite a bit in contexts where it doesn’t belong.
Primitive tools, toys, video games, mobile apps, and other recreational items should be intuitive to a large extent; however, expecting to do anything “intuitively” at an expert-level with professional tools is unreasonable. For some things, we have to actually read, study, practice, experiment, and learn to become proficient.
In addition to Cubase, I use Davinci Resolve Studio, Capture One, and Blender. It seems like their UI guys know what they’re doing–but no amount of UI-science would make it possible to just download one of those applications and hit the ground running.
Is a physical mixing desk intuitive? A guitar? A piano? A CNC machine? A router? An aquarium? The flight deck of an Airbus A350?
I’m sure the UI could be improved for better accessibility, but changing it to cater to the desires of casual users who think professional recording & mixing should be painless and effortless would be a mistake.
It belongs in the context of user interfaces. When it is clear what will happen when you click a specific area of your screen, it’s intuitive. When you can’t tell what you are looking at is actually a button, the GUI is unintuitive and poorly designed.
Did you try the free 60-day demo before upgrading?
Did you adjust any of the preferences?
In the context of using professional tools, prerequsite knowledge is usually necessary to make interfaces feel intuitive 
When you can’t tell that what you’re looking at is actually a button, the button is unintuitive and poorly designed. It’s not helpful to pretend that the whole GUI is broken when there are thousands of people who’ve used it productively for decades.
This sentiment reminds of a talk from Kevlin Henney about program mistakes, especially pertaining to line lengths:
“I don’t have to worry about my lines of code being too long. I have two screens. It’s 4k, it’s iMacs…My code can run through the distance.”
It doesn’t take a PhD in Rocket Surgery to understand what OP meant.
Except in the cases where the ratio of interface to text has excessive padding on purpose to cater to touchscreen users. Then it becomes this game where you have to find the Goldilocks text size where the text is legible without stealing too much of your screen space.
That statement makes no sense. Especially when you consider UX intuitiveness rarely has to do with experience with the tool in question in this context. All you have to do is look around all fields and see why certain tools, softwares, models of tools are preferred over others.
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DaVinci Resolve has UX workflow not dissimilar to Premiere, which happens to be one of the most used video editors out there. And recent updates keep making the gap smaller.
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Blender is a funny one to defend your point with considering it went through 3 major UI redesigns. You had one UI from version 1.0 to 2.4 (technically, you also had a different UI in pre version 1.0, but that was a commercial product which only ran on IRIS systems), another from 2.5 to 2.7 (which minor changes in between), then the current one which was introduced in version 2.8.
Yes, but also no. Prerequisite knowledge might mean you’re less affected by UX issues. You might still think the UI is not intuitive but your knowledge may (or may not) work around it.
Fair enough but, didn’t Cubase went through at lest 3 major UI redesigns as well?
It sounds like you’re conflating proficiency and UI intuition. In my world, they are very much not the same. One is learned, the other is immediately understood.
i do not usually have the time these days to reply to patronising and distastefully arrogant responses. I have been using Cubase for 30 years and have every right to point out what i feel has got worse. I know how to calibrate a monitor thanks.
I don’t think you are real.
Steinberg Cubase GUI
I’ve been a Steinberg DAW user since Pro24 on a B&W Atari without a hard drive! In terms of features and functionality I believe subjectively (and can demonstrate objectively) that it has often been the leader in its field.
However, I agree with the OP that the Cubase GUI has become progressively worse: difficult to read, difficult to use, difficult to navigate. Little of the current interface is what one could term “intuitive” and almost none of it is particularly pleasing on the eye - unless one likes 50 shades of grey and Teutonic design, that is - regardless of how long is spent using Cubase.
These ergonomic and legibility issues are down to myriad factors, only some of which can be (partially) addressed by user configuration changes or tweaks. And regardless, one has to question how good an interface is if it requires significant overhaul by the user to make it usable in the first instance.
The fact that there have been so many posts about this issue - on this forum and myriad others - over the past decade, is surely an indication that something is remiss?
I was a Sys Ops guy, an AP and coder several decades ago - a whole different world back then, admittedly - but usability testing and ergonomics was something I championed. I managed to persuade the then Director of IT to not go live with any system until a panel of users signed it off first (not ‘testers’, actual users at the coalface who would be sat in front of it for much of their working day).
There was one consistent criticism of anything that failed the UAT: a single page attempting to do too much. Back then it was anything with more than ~3 critical processes or tasks on it. Such a page was deemed counterproductive, unnecessarily burdensome, overly-complex, tiring, overwhelming, difficult to navigate, hard to comprehend, easy to get lost in and, in plain language, “bloody hard work”!
While users have undoubtedly moved on to accommodate much more complex GUIs and way more information simultaneously presented on a screen - and screen tech/size has also markedly improved - I think many of the above characterisations are still applicable to the current Cubase GUI.
Particular dislikes of mine have been:
- The lack of delineation between different windows, something which has become more prevalent over the past 10-15 years.
[Note: One of the very first things I used to choose to personalise on early Windows PCs was the look and feel of the Windows Explorer interface, using thicker lines and higher-contrast colours to clearly identify the windows which are active or inactive. On Cubase, it is almost impossible to quickly separate such windows at a glance regardless of screen calibration, contrast settings or other such tweaks. That is a design flaw in my mind.]
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Overly-cramped interfaces attempting to do too much. This negatively affects workflow and productivity and fast becomes tiresome. For the more casual user it is especially wearisome or frustrating and frequently affects program adoption negatively.
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Overly-small typefaces/icons are typically a symptom of #2 above and come about when developers and their design teams want as much as possible accessible from a single page and blindly pursue a reduction in menu diving. High-quality, rigorous user testing informs this design process reliably by prioritising the features and functionality that are actually used over and above the whizz-bang stuff a developer would like to see being employed.
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And, finally, having windows which do not have fully proportional drag scalability in 2026 is somewhat embarrassing. Coupled to the lack of consistency between various areas within the same program, this is indicative of a GUI that has grown organically for far too long without an overarching design goal in place. Despite some areas supposedly having been overhauled - clearly they’ve been altered but perhaps without understanding real-world user needs or inline with a considered rubric - I honestly don’t believe that they are better or worse, merely different.
I’ve invested over three decades in Cubase so I am highly-unlikely to change now (I’ll be dead before I’m as fluent in any other DAW); and, while I think Cubase is still at the cutting edge of music production software - and is frequently much more capable than its competition (in terms of features and functionality) - I think that all-too-often it risks getting in the way of making music, not assisting it, and that is almost entirely due to its user interface.
However, despite being a stalwart user, this does not mean that I do not think the GUI can’t be improved. It absolutely can! It is my contention that it has consistently been designed and redesigned by people who are already fluent with Cubase as opposed to someone who is specifically tasked in redesigning and optimising ergonomics and user interfaces. Intuitive it is not!
A near-perfect remark which summarises all of this TL;DR commentary clearly comes from one of my college Music Tech students (a fan of Ableton and a reticent user of ProTools):
“Yeah, it’s better but it’s gonna take too long to learn. I just wanna make music, not become a techy.”
Exactly!
A learning-optional user interface where everything can be immediately understood is not realistic for professional software. “UI intuition” doesn’t exist without prerequisite knowledge–which comes from prior experience and learned concepts.
I believe that UI and workflow are inextricably linked and given the basically infinite variations in workflow that everyone has when being creative, for a myriad of reasons (some “rational”, some not so much), make a UI that “works” for everyone nothing more than a dream with current IO devices.
If the software is not doing what you want it to the way you want it to, this can be incredibly frustrating and detrimental to your creative flow but it will happen until you are proficient with the software, a bit like learning the keyboard - now that is a ahocking UI, yes I mean both the thing you type on and the one you play, yet with practice and patience they become muscle memory.
Lastly, having used just about every major DAW out there - I always come back to Cubase. Now this could be because it was my first “pro” DAW so bias plays a part I am sure but the workflow fits my brain and the UI is just the keys I must learn to use it and in the 20+ years I have used Cubase, nothing has changed to such detriment that I have had a steep learning curve to adjust but that’s just me.
Nice to see a (mostly) civil discussion around this though because communication is what allows progress.
Getting anything from your head to the real world is a tortuous process and I wish everyone the best of fortune in their endeavours because the world desperately needs art, patience and understanding about now.
What you really mean is ‘You don’t like the interface’, I’ve been using Cubase since Atari days and haven’t had any problems with it. Maybe it’s because you took a break that maybe it wasn’t the same as you remember but it certainly isn’t in anyway awful
Just saying!
Every new version of Cubase gets hate for its UI. I usually roll my eyes if it’s something that bothers me, and I just get on with it…
I tried to constructively address all of your comments.
I agree. However, you’re using the same software for decades and complaining about default settings.
I’m sure you do–but have you done it? Have you adjusted any settings in Preferences? Why would anyone assume that you have, given your condemnation of the software? All I said on that was:
Ideally, when someone has issues with some application and they want help, they will say “These are my issues, here are the steps I’ve taken in an attempt to resolve them, and here are the results of those actions.”
Yes, but there’s a difference between “This interface is unintuitive because I don’t know how to use it” and “This interface is unintuitive because it doesn’t do what I expect it to do based on how the interface presents it.”