In our constant pursuit to make the experience for you, our customer, as painless as possible, we recently did a round of UI updates. We gave priority to the most often explicitly requested features. Then we tried to remove the barriers of clumsy design that were making the users stuck or confused.
Most of the changes were driven by chats on the web page, so I would like to extend a biiig "thank you!" to all of you who shared your experience with us this way! Also take this as a good-intended invitation if you are a bit afraid to press the chat icon. You will talk to one of the core team members, we will be ever so thankful to you for any feedback that you will provide! So no worries, let us know what you think.
So what's new?
Updates to the booking page
Is each column for one piece of gear? Do you have to select the gear first?
In order to address these concerns, the booking page needed a complete overhaul. Doing that takes a lot of time and we were not exactly sure which way to go. Except that so many of you struggled with identifying what gear is used and where to select the reservation time.
At least in our modest view, the new UI updates make this much clearer. The way that the slot-calendar shows the availability of each product and communicates that you need to select a product first before selecting a time slot for the booking is now more apparent.
In order to better gauge the cost of your session, each product has an informative 15 min price displayed right below the selection tab. You can find the approximate MAT to EUR/USD ratio under the slot selection calendar (the actual value depends on quantity discounts).
We've also added a button in the top-right corner, next to your account's balance display, to quickly add MAT tokens to your account, without searching the menus for the purchase page.
When your booking becomes active, a green button is displayed on the left side of the booking page, next to the slot selection. It used to take you to the setup page, but now it takes you directly to the processing app! No wasting time, you can go straight to work thanks to the new updates!
Updates in the studio app
The features from the setup page in the studio app are not gone however. They have just been relocated to a different place in the app. The source file for each slot can be switched in the middle of the top bar, which makes processing various files through the same settings quick and easy.
If you forgot to upload a file before your session started, you can do that from the studio app too, the upload button is right next to the source select drop-down, so the most important features are just a mouse click away thanks to these updates.
Advanced Settings
Advanced settings such as the buffer size and streaming quality were relocated to a pop-up simply called "Settings".
This includes choice between lossless and lossy encoding (which help you get an uninterrupted stream, even from the most miserable corners of the internet) as well as the new UI scaling feature.
You can access the Settings dialog with the gear icon on the right side of the top bar, left of the session information in the top right corner.
Speaking of the top right corner, a handy little feature now lives there - session information is displayed along with the all new latency measurement display. If you are experiencing audio dropouts, this can be the first basic info that should give you at least an idea about the internet connection quality between our gear and your computer.
Here are some ballpark values to guide you in troubleshooting:
- anything under 30ms: Amazing. Consider trying shorter buffer settings for better experience.
- 30ms - 200ms: probably still no dropouts at default or a bit over default buffer settings. Not the most snappy experience, but still adequate.
- 200ms - 500ms: That's pushing it a bit. If you're able to work uninterrupted and the lossless streaming doesn't tear, you're in luck and we're so happy for you
- More than 500ms: We're sorry to hear that :/ We hope you can get it to work at least with lossy encoding and a big buffer, but all bets are off at this point.
In closing
And there you have it, all news regarding the UI improvements in one place. We hope you will find it a definite step in the right direction and enjoy the whole process at least a little bit more.
If you find a part of the app confusing or can't find a setting that you're missing, let us know in the chat! We strive to have as many of our team available for chats and nothing makes us happier than to help you get the best out of mix:analog.