Anyone want Improvements in Axe-Fx User Interface?

touch33 said:
With respect to the all-important User Friendliness issue of the OP, I still hold out hope for the use of button-cap colors besides BLACK. Being blessed with the ability to see different colors (!) I'd love to see maybe a GREEN "Home" button, a RED "enter" button, maybe some YELLOW up/down/left/right cursor buttons, etc. etc. Sure would make those times when I can't pull open AE3 a little easier to quickly find my way around the front panel on a poorly lit stage ā€“ and, last time I checked, the button cap color has a microscopic-if-any effect on unit price (Cliff would know). A big UI improvement for free, I'd say!
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Colored buttons would help, but so would giving some thought to the color/brightness of lettering printed on the front of the box. Gray lettering on almost black panels looks 'cool' -so much so that scads of electronics manufacturers have used that scheme over the last 50 years. Looking 'cool' (i.e., form) should fall a distant second to function in importance, and that 'cool' looking text is darned difficult to read in anything but bright daylight. ADA/508 color contrast formulae for readability would no doubt fail miserably on that size text with that little color contrast WRT the background. I don't need to know the Pantone numbers for the panel and lettering colors to tell you that, as it is plainly obvious by simply looking at it. It doesn't affect the sound, but it causes me to avoid using the front panel and depend instead on AxeEdit. It only takes one angry vision-impaired customer to talk to an ADA/508 advocacy organization and get a really expensive lawsuit started. Ask my former employers about that, or just look up 'Maricopa Community College ADA lawsuit' on Google....
 
Friends and family keep asking me what I want for Christmas. I tell them "An updated UI for Preset and Cab management in AXE-EDITā€.

This is just a quick concept I did for fun tonight, there's a lot more to consider for something like this. I'm posting here because I think it shows that it's possible to modernize the AXE-EDIT UI without going overboard on "eye-candy".

axe_edit_concept.png
 
KornyDjentlemen said:
Friends and family keep asking me what I want for Christmas. I tell them "An updated UI for Preset and Cab management in AXE-EDITā€.

This is just a quick concept I did for fun tonight, there's a lot more to consider for something like this. I'm posting here because I think it shows that it's possible to modernize the AXE-EDIT UI without going overboard on "eye-candy".

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It wouldn't suck.
 
KornyDjentlemen said:
Friends and family keep asking me what I want for Christmas. I tell them "An updated UI for Preset and Cab management in AXE-EDITā€.

This is just a quick concept I did for fun tonight, there's a lot more to consider for something like this. I'm posting here because I think it shows that it's possible to modernize the AXE-EDIT UI without going overboard on "eye-candy".

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The Author metadata would be the difficult part. The files don't include that info in the data, IIRC. A field in AxeEdit to notate info which would be saved in an attached file ir DB of some sort would be handy, though.
 
tysonlt said:
Just that idea of folders would go a long way, even if we had to manage them ourselves!
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Yes exactly. Joe's right, the author metadata wouldn't be there - but oh well that's not a big deal. The main point is that the current UI/UX is unintuitive in a few areas like preset/cabs. In other areas it's great (I think the grid system works really well for instance).

One other problem area I can think of is the amp selector. That's becoming pretty big list with a lot of sub variations on the same amp (Clean, Chunk 1, Chunk 2, Lead, Block, etc.). I don't think folders is the solution there - however the long horizontal list with the non-real names of amps (Dizzy, Herbie, etc.) can be confusing. If we can't use the real names of the amps from a legal standpoint, I think this is where additional graphics or descriptions would be useful.

Overall, I really hope no big updates to the UI doesn't mean no updates to the UX!
 
I've been begging shamelessly for a proper browser for a long time, so I think this would be a capital idea. If the browser is browsing presets on your computer instead of the AxeFX it could use the computer file system to simplify the implementation and manage the hierarchical categorization, it wouldn't be constrained by the limited number of slots on the AxeFX, and it would be trivial to manage your presets in such a scheme.
 
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I like how Fractal remain focused on what it sounds like not what it looks like. Making it look cooler would be wasted time they could of spent on somehow making it sound even better. Theyā€™re Fractal Audio after all.
 
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I think weā€™ve agreed not to bash each other just for suggesting changes we donā€™t like, which I may have been mildly guilty of earlier.

I disagree with the idea of adding pretty faces to the controls, for the reasons given, namely that I would personally find it cluttering whereas the current interface is clean and consistent.

I do however like the idea of adding folders to allow user-managed organisation of cabs and amps. Filtering by colour gets us partway there but I like the interface suggested above. It was helpful that the contributor took the time to model it graphically and I donā€™t see why they should suffer criticism for it, or how that helps to refine the idea.
 
All I can say is that changes ARE necessary from a business point of view. The people who say "We don't need it" are totally not wrong. It all works might fine but in business you should seek to improve quality, that's what QM is for.
 
UI is really easy to use .The problem is most people don't know what individual parameters do and the axe has millions. This will not be and can't be improved by any interface just by the user learning the way sounds are put together. This is yet another reason buying presets is hugely unhelpful if you ever actually want to learn how to use your own amp to its full potential.
 
Was just thinking... the more specific your enhancement request and the more upvotes the more likely it will get prioritized. Smaller changes with less risk of breaking large portions of the code base will likely get done first.

Metadata like preset author would be cool. Thatā€™s been talked about before. Fractool usually compliments Axe Edit enough I that feel like my needs are covered.

The older I get the more I just want it to sound good out of the box with minimal editing. Old spice confirmed.
 
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