Unintuitive User Interface

Dorico
21

I understand the frustration. I’ve also struggled with Dorico. Still. When I look back at the first steps I took in notation with Finale about 15 years ago, I can’t say it got any better or easier. But I also see Dorico’s huge potential and the support is much better. In addition, there is a large community that wants to help quickly if you have a problem.

If I compare it to my profession, I am a sound engineer, and have been working with audio editing on the computer for 30 years.
There was no editor who had secrets from me…until I started working with Ableton. I cursed it and it took me a lot of effort to understand this software.
Now it’s my favorite.
The same goes for me for Dorico. a steep learning curve but happy with the switch.

2 Likes
22

Thank you for the explanation. Not annoyed at all.
Your critique is valid and some of your points are sound. Some users already commented some of them, and I’m not going to go in detail. Whereas I agree that Shift-B, 1 (or -1) is not the most obvious way to add (or substract) bars, you can still do that using the system track, which is kind of analogous of how Sibelius works when you make a system (purple) selection. Of course, once you know the Shift-B popover is generally much faster.
Regarding lyrics, I agree it should be more obvious how to create a second line. But again, once you get used to the popover and the up and down arrows, it’s quite swift to type lyrics like that. But yeah, something in the popover, like up-down arrows by the number, could be placed in order to indicate that it’s possible to enter more verses.
Ctrl-N opens another project, but it does on top of the current one. This is a common behavior in pretty much any software so I find that coherent.

That’s weird, typing Shift-N or Esc, as @eddjcaine pointed out, works for me.

This was acknowledge and changed in Dorico 4, where you can specify if the project is going to have just one flow or more. In the former case, it won’t show flow headings, as they are generally not necessary.
I confess that I felt a bit overwhelmed in the beginning, but soon it clicked and everything made sense to me. That’s why I don’t classify the software as unintuitive. I hope it clicks for you and you enjoy it as much as many users over here do.

23

I think you described your problem right there.

Curious, what modern application for creating complex data is intuitive? I work in quite a few, I’m honestly wondering what the field is like as I’ve not compared

  • Programming IDE’s - Visual Studio, Jetbrains, XCode and the like. Took me several years to get the hang of my first one. I still have to look up things on Studio despite having used it for decades
  • 3D Art - Blender, Max, etc. Blender’s got the best UI. Took me two years of daily 6-8 hours of work to get the beginning hang of it. Don’t get me started on Max, Maya, etc
  • Photoshop - I still have to look up how to use it, but I don’t use it often - much like you describe your usage of Dorico, so it’s not fair of me to claim it’s unintuitive
  • DAW’s - Nuendo and Logic are my main two, also Wavelab. Again took two years before I was comfortable
  • Unreal Engine 4,5 - Several years

Well that’s a sampling, I use more on a daily basis. From this sampling I think your thesis is flawed, by their nature complex applications are deep, and deep is the enemy of obvious.

3 Likes
24

If you prefer, you can access/download the manual as a PDF file, which you can then search and perhaps more easily step through every time a particular word or phrase appears across the whole manual. It’s how I tend to check outputs of the manual, in addition to our in-house tools.

The only downside to that is if you’re not sure what you’re looking for or what Dorico calls it, the PDF doesn’t benefit from the keyword metadata that’s embedded into the webhelp.

1 Like
25

I don’t have the time to check on every issue you mention, but I can say as a new user (coming from Sibelius and Musescore) that my experience is far less disappointing.

From the very ground up, Dorico is different from other scorewriters. It has a different design where almost every notation is modeled as a meaningful object or property in the program. Moreover, the internal representation of many elements of the score is different from what a Sibelius/Musescore/Finale user might be used to. This makes the program less intuitive for some, more intuitive for others. It really depends.

It is reasonable to think, though, that all these choices might come at the price of a steeper learning curve, because the program has more “entities” and “properties” and “actions” to deal with compared to the competitors. Think of CAD systems or 3D editing programs. They are really not intuitive for the casual user, but in the end this is a necessary tradeoff and it pays for the professionals that use it, once they learn the concepts and the interface.

Personally, I belong to those who find this design reassuring and easy to learn, maybe because I have a bit of a technical background. I know that when something will not work the way I expect, it is going to be much less fiddling around and looking for workarounds. These are my expectations, anyway, based on my experience as a user and as a programmer, and I hope I will not be proven wrong in the long run.

About the shortcut system: I was very dubious about the shortcuts assigned to the quick-edits of notes (combinations of Alt, Shift, Ctrl, and the arrows, that you mention). But I soon realized that they are very easy to remember, because of their consistency. Alt is for “edit”, the vertical axis is for changing pitch, the horizontal axis is for changes in time. Shortcuts without Alt do not change things, but help you select. You have fast ways to move things around like no other program, ​and it minimizes the rewritings.

Not to mention the pleasant surprise of having the possibility in the preferences of specifying the language of your keyboard (I’m on an Italian layout) … all the shortcuts update consequently and they show correctly in the tool-tips! For me that is really intuitive and fast in getting me started using the program.

And the jump bar, that is perfect for discovering new commands or recalling actions without fiddling in the menus. I don’t know. All very pleasant to me.

Of course, the dangers of a similar approach are that when something is not part of the design it might be more complicated to find a workaround. If the issue is a common one, it will likely be addressed in a future release, if the design is robust enough.

So all in all… Dorico does not fear to expose the user to the logic around which the score is modeled, and to structure the interface around this logic. It creates and exposes concepts that are specific, like a good professional tool.

It is not perfect but it is brave, and as a user I feel empowered, and I have fun using it.

3 Likes
26

I was thinking similar to Dan - how does other software compare?

Here’s my opinions, though please feel free to disagree:

Autocad is a nightmare, as is anything Adobe - Photoshop is three clicks for every one in CorelDraw Photopaint, (the latter being a great UI) and finding things is terrible. I use Photoshop daily and hate the UI with a passion, particularly the range of random inconsistencies. Adobe Reader / Acrobat / Whatever they’re calling it now - Insane UI!

Maya took some learning, but that’s cos my knowledge of 3d isn’t great. Seems sensibly laid out and once you’ve got the knack, I didn’t struggle to remember or to find stuff.

Quark Xpress is really easy, particularly compared with InDesign and a lovely clean interface, with the edge-case stuff hidden, but in sensible places.

Cubase - everything is just where I’d expect to find it, though Device Management is the bane of my life, but that’s not Steinberg’s fault. Cubase is really intuitive for me, but I guess that’s cos it mimics mixing desks to an extent.

Reason - beautiful UI to present a shed-load of information, and I find it really easy to figure out and navigate. Ableton and FL etc I found quite intuitive too, though haven’t used those two for ages.

Sony Vegas and other video editing software is intuitive if you’ve used old analogue editing. I’d imagine a noob would find them really bizarre. Don’t like any of them, truth be told.

Microsoft Office’s ribbon is arbitrary and bizarre. Hate the thing. They’ve managed similar with Teams - it only has five controls and even then people can’t find them!

I tend to use Eclipse when dealing with the minimal software dev I do myself, and everything is where I’d expect to find it. Zero learning curve.

Sibelius yuck. Dorico, see above.

Band in a Box - if you fancy a laugh, then have a look at that UI! “If you give an infinite number of typewriters to an infinite number of monkeys then you eventually end up with Band in a Box”.

A special note for my friend’s Tyros 5 keyboard, which has the weirdest UI I’ve ever met. It seems Yamaha have sorted it for the Genos, but whoever dreamed up Tyros needs a spell in the jim-jam clinic.

I’ve just hunted down the infamous Youtube review of Dorico… I think he pretty much summed up my thoughts. I have just installed Dorico 4 on my Mac though, so will have a go through it at work tomorrow.

Edit: Forgot to mention Audacity… 'nuff said!

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Just don’t take his word for it. Some of it’s out of date and some of it was inaccurate at the point of recording. It doesn’t acknowledge popovers, entering/adjusting from the caret or keyboard shortcuts at all, for instance.

5 Likes
28

Dorico tries to solve one of the most complicate tasks in the world, that is to write a music score. An incredibly sophisticate object, coding several dimensions into a two-dimensional space.

It could do like other programs, and offer the most basic tools to let you enter a melody with the mouse. Then, everything else would be buried under several levels of complexity.

Or it could do as it did, that is offering everything at the same level, for the fastest way of working on all the dimensions of a score. With Dorico, one can write a score as one would write a novel with a wordprocessor.

This means having to learn how the wordprocessor works, and once learnt it just works.

Paolo

3 Likes
29

I agree with you. I think the key command of Dorico is not logical. For example, some time must use 3 or 2 keys for simple notation. (Ctrl + Alt + up) to change the octave interval. For changing a note must keep (Ctrl + up or down). These key commands slow down the composers in notation.

30

I guess one aspect of the the whole thread is really “best tool for the job”. I even went on a course on Photoshop but still can’t remember much. Probably because for a photographer Lightroom does most things you want unless you’re merging different photos. Nearly 30 years ago, I did some work with Corel Draw and seem to remember picking it up really quickly.

My first reaction to Dorico was that playback features were hopelessly insufficient so I passed until v3. Then I thought – I don’t understand any of this and it seems completely unintuitive but my instinct told me that this was, or least very soon would be, the sort of software I was looking for. So I simply read up on it to try and grasp what the team were trying to achieve with the design and once I’d determined that in fact it was quite a logical way to go about things, I decided to get on with it and learn it. I haven’t looked back. Nor will you!

31

Yes and the fact that therefore you have to adapt to your tool regardless.

I avoided Sibelus/Finale for years and use Lilypond, only because they were so old, and old software necessarily is locked into the mistakes of the past. Once it got a little established with 3.5 I jumped on Dorico, judging it feature complete enough and with an excellent user experience to be worth it. D4 has hit that out of the park, composing has never been so easy (notation wise) and I expect it’ll just continue to get better.

Of all the apps I compare above Dorico key commands is head and shoulders above the rest in terms of logic and consistency. Do any of those others even do something as simple as have similar shortcuts use similar hotkey, such as the Shift-XYZ convention in Dorico? Short answer no.

Speaking as a developer, developers are just lazy at trying to do something easy to remember and logical. It’s how their brains work, they think their users are as convoluted thinkers as they are. Fortunately the Dorico developers aren’t like this (an exception)

1 Like
32

There is a reason for it being this way:

  • Arrow keys navigate the selection around
  • Alt/Opt plus arrow keys moves items a little bit (two keys = harder to make a change by accident) - e.g. raising notes by step in Write mode, moving items graphically a standard, relatively small amount in Engrave mode
  • Ctrl/Cmd plus Alt/Opt plus arrow keys moves items by a larger amount - e.g. raising notes by octave in Write mode, moving items graphically a larger amount in Engrave mode
7 Likes
33

So I’ve put in the painful hours to learn where Dorico puts things…

…and then I upgraded to Dorico 4 where they’ve moved and hidden stuff!!

I’m sure I changed to swing feel using a Play → Playback options dialogue box. Gone!
And I inserted a rehearsal mark by clicking on the ‘Rehearsal Mark’ button on the right toolbar. Gone!

What else has moved? Is there a ‘here’s a list of things that moved’ list somewhere because the Dorico help files I tend to trawl when I’m searching for something now seem to be quite out of date.

34

Playback Options is now in the Library menu, along with all the other Options. (Shift CTRL P – again similar to the other Options.)

Rehearsal Mark entry can still be done from the Write menu, or (easiest) with Shift A. If you can learn the mnemonic letters that go with the SHIFT key in Write mode, that will save you a lot of time.

A full list of changes is in the Version History Release Notes.

35

You can access the Dorico 4 manuals from here, e.g. the Dorico Pro 4 webhelp is here.

The New features page highlights significant changes since the previous version. The overhauling of the lower zone, the addition of the Library menu, and changes to toolboxes in Write mode are listed there.

36

And anyhow there’s now the jump bar, so you don’t need to remember where everything is …

If we didn’t rearrange the furniture occasionally we’d still be living in grass huts :grin:

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