Best way to get this harp instrument working
I'm working with a musician/artist who has installed a wind sensor at a site and wants to hook it up to a virtual Aeolian harp interface. The instrument itself is working so now I need to make it look good. Here's a draft layout from the client, which I think looks good but I've got concerns about how the knobs will work in the UI. I'm worried they're going to be tricky to get right with a mouse and even harder to use on touchscreen devices. Is that unfounded? Or am I better switching those to range sliders? I'd like to avoid the latter if possible as I think it will be slider overload but if it works better than knobs then I'll put up with that
2 Replies
I think UX wise, rotary controls can be fine as long as the input is easy enough. I'd recommend just using a slider motion, so click and drag left or right / up or down to change the value rather than messing with detecting rotation
another alternative that can work well is to drag on the control you want and then measure the angle from the center of the control
you'd have to hand-code the logic for both, but I don't think they'd be particularly hard to use on either mouse or touch screen
I think what's nice about the rotary knob is that it won't need any instructions, it's so naturally intuitive. I'd like to avoid filling the screen with tooltips or instructions beyond what the client has already put in their draft design
I did wonder if a rotary slider might be better?