If anyone from the Yamaha Motif/Montage team, or anyone that has contact with folks from the Yamaha Motif/Montage team sees this message on Motifator, please pass this message along:

The software User Interface (UI) for the Montage Sucks!  If Yamaha has any plans to produce a commemorative Motif for the 20th Anniversary of the Motif, or in celebration of Yamaha’s 50 years in Synthesizer production, please do not replicate the ugly, poor HCI (Human Computer Interaction), design of the Montage.  I recently got a chance to reeeally see the Montage UI up close.  ARGH!  I’ve had opportunities in the past to dabble a little here and there, I’ve always thought it was ugly in compared to the Motif UI.  But now in addition to ugly, I’m also suggesting its poorly designed.  From the poor choice of fonts, point sizes, to the conflicting multi-modal choices menus vs dialogs vs touch buttons.  Its a mess!!!

If Yamaha was going to go with a touch screen, why not take notes from the designers of their Genos line? I’m not a fan of Genos, but the Genos user interface is nice, and for the most part sensible and functional.  The Kronos also has a beautiful touch user interface.  The Roland Fantom has a beautiful touch user interface.  Yamaha could have done a variation on a theme from any one of these!!

What was Yamaha going for when they built the UI for Montage?  From time to time I joke about Montage’s UI and compare it to the touch screens on a McDonald’s cash register, or an ATM, but really now that I’ve spent several days(almost a week) working with it; IMO its awful!  Not just to use, but to look at.  While I was working on it, I kept looking for some way to change the color/font theme and wishing there was an app that I could download to it that would change the UI.  Yes Yamaha did structurally borrow a few UI ideas from Motif but the touch screen rendition of those ideas is hideous.

If anybody out there knows what the Montage UI designers were going for when they designed the Montage UI please share!  Maybe it would help me understand some of the design choices.  At the very least why not borrow a few good ideas from the look at feel of the Genos UI?

If there is going to be some kind of new commemorative/anniversary version of the Motif with a touch screen: will somebody please get the word to Yamaha to give us a user interface more along the lines of the Kronos, Fantom, or Genos.  If they don’t want to go in that direction, the Motif’s current UI will do, its much more elegant than the UI they’ve kludged together for the Montage.