Even 40 years people already joked about the alarm clock you mentioned: everyone knew how to use VCRs, but the damn clock was never adjusted. Since it was neither intuitive, nor something a user would memorize how to do, most VCRs just sat there saying 12:00 or 00:00 forever. For the alarm clock, of course, we had to learn since it was its main function.
I see this in music equipment a lot, too. To program something with modes you need significantly more time than something with just knobs. And the performance possibilities are also much limited as soon as you bring in menu-diving.
That's a great point about looking to music equipment for UX ideas. If you want to see what happens when a design team puts serious effort into building a satisfying and effective interface, look at electronic music devices.
Those mixer boards you see are horribly complicated, but with the thousands of knobs and buttons most anyone can figure out how to mute a microphone in a few minutes or less.
The touchscreen versions can be more complicated - but since they also have the ability to change the knobs to presets they may be more useful to actual sound engineers.
Good points. Some mechanical version can also change the buttons, faders and knobs positions to presets when they have automation circuits, this has been a thing since the late 70s. So you get the best of both worlds.
One important aspect is that with tactile controls one barely needs presets, though, except for recall. Mixing done from scratch is quite fast, even when compared to presets, so I would argue that there is a significant tradeoff when going digital.
Even 40 years people already joked about the alarm clock you mentioned: everyone knew how to use VCRs, but the damn clock was never adjusted. Since it was neither intuitive, nor something a user would memorize how to do, most VCRs just sat there saying 12:00 or 00:00 forever. For the alarm clock, of course, we had to learn since it was its main function.
I see this in music equipment a lot, too. To program something with modes you need significantly more time than something with just knobs. And the performance possibilities are also much limited as soon as you bring in menu-diving.