The Push & Pull of Building Products

Kontakt 7 is another good example, great that users are highlighting these design issues. Some of us have suffered in silence for years. Searching for sounds in Kontakt is anti-creative, layout clumsy, and every time when closing an instrument I get asked 'do you want to save changes'? No!!! Please switch this silly alert off!

The fundamental concept of pointing toward ,old, and ,new, customers is incorrect I think.

For the very reason both cannot be met, as the article explains, a better approach is to create more open and standardized products.

In this way old and new software AND hardware can leverage both old and new users. In my view Kontakt is the closest thing NI has for achieving this. It shows in 3rd party developers and contributors.

If NI sat and thought about how it might open to hardware better, it would make a revolutionary leap - expanding for all users past and in the future.

Oh wow, that hits a nerve. I am so heavily invested in NI - both hardware and software (I have no less than 6 hardware NI devices) and am consistently disappointed by the promise of Komplete Kontrol. The promise is - you get this awesome hardware (and the hardware IS awesome) like the S-88 with its amazing full-colour displays and LED fingerboards.... and they only work if you're running the KK plugin. It doesn't matter if you just want a Kontakt instrument, you must first load it through KK.

But that would be OK, if KK were a bit more user friendly. Let's start with the fact that you can't (easily) maximize its screen real estate. Or that for browsing, you have to always change its default browsing mode if you prefer to browse by instrument rather than the sketchy attribute browser. Let's be honest, whomever is creating tags/categories and tagging/categorizing patches isn't doing a very thorough job - so you're not going to find something across instruments using the attribute browser.

I think KK is the one product most in need of a complete re-imagining. We could even start with the marketing aspect - it's incredible to see the full-colour title screen of your patch/instrument on your hardware display. Let's start there. Let's figure out a better "browsing" mode that's geared toward true exploration and discovery - can you create, for example, a "wizard" using the 3D dial or a better way to categorize and find similar sounds across instruments? Can we have "instrument" focus vs "patch" focus right off the bat, and can we please save those preferences for the next time?

For probably the most important "product" in the NI suite from a marketing perspective - because it touches every instruments and most hardware - I would think that Komplete Kontrol ought to get the most attention from a UX perspective. It should feel very lightweight for advanced users (I often choose Kontakt from my plugin list rather than KK just because I assume there's a performance / memory / footprint hit when choosing KK), should feel like a "default" for beginners (why not just call it "Native Instruments"), and provide an extremely flexible and configurable framework to consume NI instruments with NI hardware.

And for God's sake, please add a Maximize Window button so we're not locked into a smaller screen real estate than we have (I realize there are workarounds but they ugly bruh)