Video Transcript
User Experience Part One
8m 40s
0:08
Time for a reality check: It doesn’t matter how well you
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design your Q-SYS audio system if the user can’t figure out how to operate it.
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For most end users, their only interaction with Q-SYS.
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is going to be in the form of the User Control Interface that you design for them.
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Now, whether that’s on a QSC Touchscreen, an iPad or iPhone, or a PC Viewer,
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this UCI is their only access to the audio system.
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As far as they’re concerned, that UCI is Q-SYS.
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If you design a clunky UCI that’s hard to navigate, then they think that Q-SYS sucks.
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And it doesn’t! We here at QSC are relying on your UCIs to represent Q-SYS to the world.
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So whether you like it or not, you have to consider
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the user’s experience when you’re designing their interface.
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In this video series, we’re going to discuss some basic
1:00
design principles that contribute to a positive user experience.
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For some people, this may be second nature.
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For others, you may learn some things you’ve never considered before.
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While we’ll be focusing on building UCIs with the Q-SYS Designer software,
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the design concepts we’ll cover here are universal and you may start to notice
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these principles whenever you interact with a new website, software or app.
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This is a crash course in design philosophy.
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Let’s start big: you don’t have to be an artist to design a good UCI.
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Yes, a skilled graphic designer can add a lot to the visual appearance of a UCI,
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but we’re not trying to turn you into a graphic designer right now.
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This video is about making a comfortable, intuitive, and functional UCI,
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and you don’t need any Photoshop skills for that.
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At the highest level, just keep this one thing in mind: design is intention.
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What does that mean?
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Well, imagine that you’re working on your computer at your desk,
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and you have a coaster for your coffee mug.
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Where does that coaster go?
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If you’re right-handed, you probably instinctively placed it to the right of your keyboard,
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with your intention to make it as easy and natural to use as possible.
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You designed it there, based on where you naturally want it to be.
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You probably didn’t put it inside a drawer, because only an insane person would keep their coffee there.
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Building a UCI is similar; you just probably have to spend a little bit more time
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figuring out exactly where the user instinctively wants to find everything.
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So what’s the first step? Figuring out who that user is!
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Do a little research into who is actually going to be using your UCI.
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Is this a maintenance UCI for the venue’s engineer?
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Is it a public UCI that anyone can interact with?
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The interface you build for something even as simple
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as an Audio Player might be very different depending on who has access to it.
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If you’re able to, it would be worth your time to talk to the actual people involved.
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The more people you talk to, the more you’ll get a good sense of what they need from the UCI.
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You should also consider how many UCIs and Touchscreens are required in the venue.
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If multiple people need to access the same device,
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you have to consider whether you should build a single UCI specific to that device
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that services all their needs,
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or whether it might be better to build separate UCIs that they can log into individually from any device.
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In Q-SYS, you can change a touchscreen’s properties to allow “Dynamic UCI assignment”,
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which allows a user to choose between different UCIs.
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Knowing which method to choose will probably become
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more obvious once you complete the next step of design: Planning!
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You may want to start by drawing a flowchart to guide you through all of the possible functions of the system.
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This is called the taxonomy of the system,
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a chart that will help you to group related concepts together under logical categories.
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Taxonomy is a term you may recognize from taxonomy charts of plants and animals
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that separate them into kingdoms, genuses, phylums,
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all that other stuff from school that you’ve forgotten about.
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Structure out your UCI the same way, before you start building it.
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How many different pages or layers do you need for each task, and what makes sense for your venue?
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Like everything in design, there’s no right answer here.
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Maybe you want a Main Page that lets the user navigate to each of the rooms in the venue,
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and from there you can choose between Audio Control or Lighting Control within that room.
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Or maybe it makes more sense to choose between Audio or Lighting first, and then select a room.
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It will all depend on the different tasks you want to make available,
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and it’s worth the time to organize them in a way that lets the user accomplish each task as easily as possible.
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Within Q-SYS, you can build as many different pages on each UCI as you like.
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And don’t forget that there are a variety of ways you can navigate from page to page.
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Simple UCIs may take advantage of the Page Tabs to select different pages.
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Page tabs can be placed on any edge of your UCI to provide simple menu navigation.
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Or, you could disable these tabs and let the user simply swipe from page to page.
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But more advanced UCIs might have a more complicated menu structure,
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so you probably want to disable the swipe option and instead use the
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Navigation Buttons to direct your user from page to page.
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Navigation buttons can send the user to one particular page,
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which lets you guide their movement more specifically.
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And don’t forget that you can also use Popup buttons to hide away certain controls.
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Just add a popup button from the layout components, and add any number of controls inside its popup window.
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You can resize that window and move it around, and then close it to keep those controls hidden.
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Or – if you’re interested in diving into a little bit of coding – you can
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script different layers to transition on and off-screen as well.
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But whether you’re using pages, popups, or layers, they’re all a part of the taxonomy of your system,
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which is why a flowchart can help you plan out your UCI before you build it.
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A big thing to consider during this planning process involves ... choice.
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What choices do you want to give the user? I mean, choice is a good thing, right?
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Well of course it is … but it can also be a bad thing.
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A design that doesn’t provide enough choices can seem too simplistic or even condescending.
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But too much choice can be a huge problem as well.
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If it takes the user a long time to find the thing they’re looking for,
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or they’re never certain which button to press,
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then the system appears to be too complicated and difficult to work with.
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So, if you feel the need to overcomplicate your UCIs, just blast that idea out of your head right now.
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Providing a user with fewer choices will increase the speed with which they can navigate the system,
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and reduce the number of errors they make along the way.
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Let’s look at the Audio Player again, for instance.
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You may be tempted to drag all these controls onto a UCI so the user can do whatever they like,
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and in some cases that may be fine.
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But if this Audio Player is just playing background music in the Lobby of a hotel for instance,
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does the receptionist really need the ability to fast-forward or rewind the song?
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What about this Auto-Play button?
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This button tells the Audio Player to automatically start whenever the design is pushed to a Q-SYS Core.
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Does the Lobby receptionist know that? No.
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This button will probably just confuse them,
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and you never want the user to be confused when they’re operating your system.
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You want to provide just enough choices so they can accomplish their tasks,
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but not enough choices that they can get themselves into trouble.
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So to recap, research and planning lets you identify the main tasks that your UCI should facilitate,
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and give you a ground plan on how you want to organize the UCI’s page structure.
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Determining which choices your user can make plays a big role in the UCI’s complexity.
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Once you’re comfortable with knowing what you want your UCI to do, then it’s time to start building it.
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In the next video we’ll take a look at common design philosophies to keep
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in mind when you start building the UCI.
Lesson Description
User Experience Part One
8m 40s
Learn basic design principles to enhance the user experience of Q-SYS.
Tips and Definitions
User Experience Part One
8m 40s
Coming soon!
Downloads and Links
User Experience Part One
8m 40s