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Band-in-a-Box 10: A Good Example of Bad Software 		Usability

Software Review: Band in a Box 10

This excerpt taken from the PG Music, Inc. website:
The award-winning Band-in-a-Box is so easy to use! Just type in the chords for any song using standard chord symbols (like C, Fm7 or C13b9), choose the style you'd like, and Band-in-a-Box does the rest. Band-in-a-Box automatically generates a complete professional quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar and strings in a wide variety of popular styles. (Jazz, Pop, Country, Classical and more.)
While Band in a Box (hereafter BIAB) may be conceptually easy to use, it has reserved for itself a special place in User Interface Hell. While this could very easily turn from somwhat-biased critique into unashamed bashing and insults -- which would be very much deserved -- I will attempt to show some restraint. I will be reviewing BIAB version 10. To be blunt, it is an example of what NOT to do when designing an application. Ah... where to begin. So many things to critique, so little time... Anyway, I will not review the entire application - that would take an immense amount of time. This application has a very specialized use, so someone like myself, a music teacher by trade, is forced to put up with a very difficult program to get access to what it can do.


General Layout

BIAB greets the user with a cluttered. A wealth (or horde) of controls are placed on the main screen. A great many extras exist on this main screen. A not-so-quick survey of the main screen boasts 14 different menus, two piano keyboard displays, and four control panels packed with buttons, indicators, progress meters, and other miscellany in addition to the chord display for the composition in question.

Toolbars

The use, abuse, and overuse of toolbars in BIAB accounts for part of the general ugliness of the interface. Toolbars, in and of themselves, can be useful in an application because they can provide a fast shortcut for frequently-accessed functions, like saving, printing, and the like. In fact, they are much like spices -- they can be used to enhance, but too much detracts from the dish. Additionally, many buttons do not make their functions apparent. For example, the user has the option to choose from favorite styles merely by clicking a button. The only problem is that the button used to access this feature is a small button marked 'f' which is placed by another button marked 'STY'. Also included in one toolbar is a guitar tuner. This would hardly classify as a frequently-performed task and certainly does not warrant a button of its own. Three small buttons placed near the display for the current song style are completely unmarked. Not only does the user not know the function of these buttons, he is forced to remember them.

Surprisingly, PG Music's developers have (probably unknowingly) done something well -- the New, Save, Open, Play, .MID, and .WAV buttons are all simple text buttons. Sometimes the best labels are text because a picture could not adequately describe the button's function, and the words are often larger than a picture would be, making it easier for the user to click on the button itself.

Kitchen sink syndrome

Band in a Box is an excellent example of what I call the Kitchen Sink Syndrome. KSS is the belief that a program must include features for the edge case. "A user might need to be able to do such-and-such!" is the cry of many a programmer. A user would rather have a tool which performs its primary tasks well and includes many secondary tasks without including the Kitchen Sink. It is obvious that many features are "bolted-on" as an afterthought or are outright hacks designed to workaround an existing limitation in the current design.



Examples:
It is possible to use BIAB for printing music, but it does the job so poorly that no serious musician or composer would consider using it. Certain elements, such as the staff upon which the notes are written, look very good. Other elements, such as the chord listing, look unprofessional -- such use would be akin to using the font Comic Sans for a resume. By attempting to do a vast number of tasks, it does very few of them, if any, very easily or very well.



Menus

As I mentioned above, obvious hacks and bolted-on features abound. A simple looking-over of the menus is an example of how bad the situation really is. There are literally nine different items in the File menu devoted to opening files, two of which do the exact same thing and are not the only example of redundant menu items, either. Some menu headers are abbreviated - 'Opt.' for options and Not'n for Notation. The Play menu actually has an item named 'Panic !', which indicates that the user might do just that. Unfortunately, the user probably wouldn't remember where to find this item if he really did need it. Why? The organization of the menus, or lack thereof, could be compared to the cleanliness of your average apartment kept by a bachelor. The use of an ellipsis following a menu item is generally accepted as a means to indicate to the user that a window will pop up and ask for more information. Ellipses are not consistently used. Four different items that could be considered 'options' items could be found outside the 'Opt.' menu.

Besides poor organization, the menus are also poorly constructed. Most have too many items for a user to quickly find the desired item. Some items, by their mere existence, scream "Hack Alert! Hack Alert!", like Opt.|Preferences and Opt.|Preferences(2). If I'm looking to reconfigure something, which one do I click on? The keyboard shortcuts are, by far, the worst I've seen since WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS, which is infamous for its [Ctrl+Alt+Shift F K Z] kinds of commands. Ctrl+O, the Windows standard for Open File, opens the notation window. However, a second execution of the same shortcut does NOT, however, return the user to the chord-editing mode. F3 is actually the command to Open File. F2 apparently was too difficult to remember as being Save File, so PG Music added an alternate - Ctrl+S. Most keyboard shortcuts are something to the tune of Ctrl+F? and Alt+F? and some are attached to functions which do not need shortcuts, like Alt+F5 for Chord Options.



Dialogs

Dialog windows can easily be one of the most abused interface elements short of a message box like BeOS' BAlert object. BIAB does an excellent job of confusing the user, possibly causing him to lose data, and making some major gaffes in design just by reusing dialog windows. Unnecessary confirmations abound, like each time you hit the Delete key to erase the current chord, it does the infamous Windows 'Are you sure?' trick. Clicking on certain menu items causes a similar result - "[click] This will simultaneously flush all the toilets in Paris, France. Do you wish to continue?"

Like everywhere else, BIAB dialogs are cluttered with controls and often have little logical order to their placement except in certain cases where you can tell that it was placed in a certain location because there was free space to add in another button. When designing a control layout, the developer in question needs to remember that each window has a purpose and that both the controls and their layout have an influence on the difficulty of use.

Some dialog windows were afterthoughts or the time simply was not taken to rethink the layout of the window. An excellent example of both is the Preferences(2) dialog. That's its name. Really. It shouldn't be, though. Instead of rethinking and redesigning the first preferences panel, a second menu item was added to the 'Opt.' menu and given a number - never mind that I have no idea what differentiates the contents of the first one from the second except when it was added to the application. Notice the 'Soloist and Melodist Prefs...' button at the bottom left corner of the dialog. This button - you guessed it - pops up another window. The dialog panel it brings up is likely the only one in BIAB which is not cluttered. Nonetheless, the checkboxes have obscure-sounding functions like "Melodist Velocity Adjust."

Some dialogs have problems which are the result of just plain laziness. Using the Windows has a default Open window which is easily added to an application. Clicking on the File|File Utilities|Delete File from Disk menu item brings up a window which, dangerously I might add, has the title 'Open'. *Someone* was too lazy to either (a)change the title or (b) make a useful dialog box for this purpose. Not good. This would not be the only example of poorly-titled windows in BIAB, either, as evidenced by the Preferences(2) dialog.

To their credit, PG Music does have an Open window which is exceedingly helpful. One of the two windows the user can open a song style with is a custom job which lists all the styles in the current folder by name (duh) but also lists their long name, miscellaneous useful details about the style, and even provides example songs which are similar to the style. There is also an option to preview the current song in a different style without changing the current one. Very nice, indeed. Too bad it is also plagued by unnecessary checkboxes, unclear terminology, and even a button to print the current style from the Open Style window. Try figuring that one out when you run out of bathroom reading material some time.

Usage

One of the recurring problems in BIAB's interface is the serious clutter. Sometimes it just takes a long time to visually hunt for the desired control. Other flaws, like lack of attention to have natural train of thought influence the control layout, have already mentioned above. Certain miscellaneous problems also appear as the app is used. Chord editing is speedy for those who are only using at most two chords per measure of music. Any more requires the user to slog through the process in a settings window. The designers also have devised a way of kludging around a design flaw related to changing the number of beats in a measure with respect to the way the music "feels". I won't go into it here because most people probably won't have much of an idea of how bad the hack is, but it is equivalent to a square peg going through a round hole.

Conclusions

This entire article has largely been a critical look at the problems exhibited by BIAB as a result of management and developers not paying attention to what is really important in application development. However, there is a feature which is very nice - a feature called Tap Tempo. Instead of setting the speed of the music to an arbitrary number of beats per minute, the speed is set by tapping a key at a certain speed. Very useful for someone who knows about how fast a song should be but couldn't possibly judge the number of beats per minute would be. Most of the application is just plain disgusting. I, personally, have to use it because the tasks it performs are more important than my time in learning how to use it. If anyone can avoid using Band in a Box or can somehow successfully convince PG Music to quit falsely advertising their products until they truly are easy to use, please do so. Until then, I can at least hate using it and be justified in doing so.


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