For me there is one central thing with respect to user experience design that’s consistently overlooked in many contexts: the value of familiarity.Ceylon wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:04 amSo I'm currently studying UX design and one of my assignments got me thinking about the design of the electric guitar. For those unfamiliar with the field, user experience design is something most commonly applied to software tools, apps et cetera where you look at what the people who will use your product want it to be able to do, identify problems with current products on the market and apply feedback from users when you design your new product to tailor it to be as suitable and easy to use and learn as possible. This is a subset of the broader field of user-centered design, which isn't limited to the strictly digital but also to physical products.
This doesn't seem to really be a thing in guitar design? Perhaps the reason is that the solid body electric reached its functional maturity so early on. I remember reading that after the Telecaster had been on the market for a few years, Leo talked to players, got their feedback on what they would want their guitars to be able to do and implemented those changes into the Stratocaster. Pow, most successful and iconic guitar ever resulted from that.
But no truly major changes have been made and become standard since the end of the 60s or beginning of the 70s, with the exception perhaps of locking vibratos and active electronics. Usually it seems like design committees or individual inventors or master builders are the people bringing new products onto the market more or less by themselves. You get things like headless guitars, synth pickups, Evertune bridges, additional strings and True Temperament necks, and these have all caught on, but not with the vast majority of players.
So if a new product designer decided they wanted to bring a truly player-adapted guitar into the world, and they went about talking to like a hundred players about what changes, big or small, they would want to make to their instruments, what features they would want to get rid of or add or what minor tweaks could make their guitars more perfect for them, and then set about creating that instrument, what do you figure that would look like in 2023? Would such a product catch on, or is the electric guitar now such an iconic cultural artifact that it can't be successfully re-imagined anymore?
This is also a question to you all, having years or decades of experience of playing. What's your pet peeves or main issues with your guitars that you think more and better design work could improve?
If you rent a car, you can be fairly sure you’ll be able to locate accelerator, brake, turn signals, and wipers easily. While it’s possible that the locations of these things could be optimized by someone’s logic, it would harm the overall user experience if, say, the accelerator and brake pedals swapped positions. Not only would it harm the experience of driving that one car (at least at first), but it would more importantly harm the experience of driving multiple cars, switching back and forth between them.
I see the stasis in guitar design as similarly-beneficial. Much like a piano or violin has matured, the design of the guitar has settled on a core set of archetypes that persist because entire ways of playing have matured around those design choices.
Many innovations have come and gone, and in the 1990s we largely reverted to a set of core mid-century functionality. There’s a lot of insight there—we collectively (as a market) deemed that those mid-century designs were sufficiently expressive and got out of the way a bit more than the active pickups (ugh battery changes) locking vibratos (stay in tune but take an hour and a small tool kit to get in tune the first time), etc.
So to me the most important user experience feature would be consistency. A pianist would hate it if you “improved” the position of the pedals or changed the spacing between the keys. I’d hate changes to the guitar for similar reasons.