This is a good starting point. Let me investigate if we can expand this to include real screen examples and touch and button navigations.
Should we rename on this wireframe “main menu” screen with mixer ?
There is still a “main menu” which is shown in V4/touch. We should consolidate this with the V5 menu that is called, “Chain Menu”.
All this is confusing because labels on v5 buttons say opt (options) and mix (mixer). We should have all this aligned. What do you think ?
Things have changed a little since the button layout and legends were designed but they broadly still work fine. The “MIX” button takes you to the mixer view. The “OPT” button shows the option menu for the current view.
We had to change the purpose of the V4 encoder buttons for Oram but tried to keep them as aligned with the panel legends as we could. Maybe we could create an overlay that users could print out and stick to their older V3/V4 devices… 
The Zynthian is primarily a musical device, not a computer.
Function is what defines the form, not eye candy.
It has to work, be simple, put all availabe computational power into music and sound, not into a UI&UX!
A desire to sometimes have a local view onto the Native GUI of some plugins is just for making fine adjustements of items and settings not exposed to Zynthian-UI or to adjust them in their native context, which for the Zynthian style of usability is just an exception.
If one wants a computer or iPhone style UI, they shall use such a device.
Zynthian is different.
And I hope it stays different.
Pi 5 can run many parts of Ubuntu Studio. Ardour, whatever. There are manuals and howtos, GIYF (or chase the Duck, or Start the page,…).
With Touch, you get a nice Graphic (?) UI & UX.
Reaper runs on Linux.
Even Windows VSTs run on this in Wine and Box86/Box64.
I’m a noob in Linux and coding, but I’ve made that work with the help of the internet. And it works surprisingly well. I’ve tried some VSTs that came from Grenoble. Nice. I really consider to make a Pi-Gments machine just for this VST.
If it may help somehow, I would like to bring my grain of salt, as a former designer and visual semiotics researcher.
Albeit the idea of an abstract and visually hermetic UI certainly appeals to the rationalist architect in me, the issue in such a design and UX approach would be that it would elude the fundamental functions of icons.
In a received semiotic tradition, mostly defined by the thought of Ch. Morris and S.S. Peirce, elements of a visual grammar with functional meanings should abide to two principles:
1] They must act as signals, for the object, process or behaviour which they represent referentially, that is in a neutral and objective way.
2] They must be conventional, that is underpinned by a semantic social consensus, about their meaning within a larger or specific community.
Road signs are an excellent example for this typology of communication.
In such a perspective - and given that synthesiser and DAW functions could be conveyed only partially by agreed graphical signs (maybe, there might be a certain degree of consensus only about oscillators, envelopes, modulators and transport bar actions) - I would advise to avoid turning completely the Zynthian UI in a fascinating but unfathomable pattern of hieroglyphs, for how visually satisfying they might be.
Such type of graphic signals would fall into the category of symbols, i.e. a kind of signs bearing a spiritual or ideal meaning (characteristic of artistic and poetic messages in general), or even trespass into the purview of enigmas, like Renaissance emblems.
This kind of aesthetically engaging visual communication, while valuable per se as an artistic gesture, is unfortunately against the basic rule of good industrial design, form follows function (and only seldom the other way round), and would unavoidably entail a printed legend or reference sheet, thus acting against the user experience immediacy that such a semantically concentrated design should intrinsically aim at.
So, in a nutshell, let us keep on devising possible minimalistic iconic layouts for the Zynth, but leave the representation of more complex procedures to simple textual abbreviations (already sort of signals in themselves).
Just my earnest viewpoint, on the basis of my knowledge in this field.
All the best! 
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Semiotics …
Where I first heard the term…
Fairly simple English in lovely Irish accents.
KISS has probably been the most basic overall design aesthetic and we flatter ourselves, a little, that we have considered interfaces outside of the graphic, so meaning is possibly a fairly low level sub class in the overall approach. This helps build meaning. There are also two primary use cases identified. The Performer and the Off Line adapter. These, unfortunately can be competitive positions as the re-assurance required of a performer ( Is this machine actually about to do what I expect it do when I slam down on this rather exciting Maj7 th chord? ) is different from the more exploratory nature of the later. ( Can I get to that one control that allows the Fmaj7 chord sound just a little more flowery?)
Familiar bold icons perhaps favours the first, precision and possible textual information favours the second.
The normal answer at this point is sling another PICBAGF. (Perhaps it could be another GUI flag?)
That would seem like an awful amount of limited coding effort that might be better devoted elsewhere.
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Being a newbie, although not really a newbie, please allow my 2 cents:
Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to teach myself the basics of using V2 and now V5.1 kits running oram stable as simple keyboard expanders. I still feel quite lost and overwhelmed, partly due to digging too much information on older topics, and also because there is a lot of power and a lot of options behind those few buttons and encoders.
In the meantime I’ve had a small flu hiatus, but I’m about to restart my efforts, with a more systematic approach. I’d love to be able to use a (partial) Zynthian simulator to explore and learn the navigation flow without the real synth behind, for the enlightenment I’m sure I’ll find ahead and unlock the metaphor and make each configuration/operation more logical and natural for me.
I lean towards a pragmatic approach, where we don’t add a layer of semantic and workflow complexity, and I completely agree that would be the case if we chose to be more iconographic.
zynthian could look like loopypro one day, 50% daw 50% flexible stage control
External midi2dmx adapter. Zynthian is very useful and nice with this!
Have the lightshow synced with whatever you do at the keyboards and launchpads, whenever.
In the general conception of a graphical UI, and related user experience, there seem to be two diverging tendencies:
A] Referentiality. A textual fragment describes more or less objectively what the underlying function is expected to effect.
B] Iconic symbolisation. A graphical sign represents in a condensed way the meaning of the connected procedure.
While we could easily think that cutting-edge technological devices should lean towards ideograms rather than textual descriptions, for arranging the panel or screen presented to the user, it is a fact that digital electronics, high fidelity audio appliances and their dependent subset represented by synthesiser hardware still rely mostly on textual signals, to convey their functions.
The reason for that is that technical operation, not being a socially mainstream behaviour overall, does not enjoy any widespread acknowledgement of an adopted code of conventions (except for very few ordinary actions like Open/Save, Play/Stop, On/Off, Fast Forward/Rewind, etc ).
Nonetheless, traditional UI paradigms are becoming rapidly obsolete, not least because software houses refuse to revisit radically the existing code of the graphical layout, to accommodate the nowadays’ unprecedented variety of screen resolutions and display sizes.
As a result, just to advance an eloquent example, the screen arrangement of my DAW of choice since decades (Cubase) has become unbearably crowded along the years, to the point of risking to be almost unusable within a few software iterations, due to the overwhelming amount of textual information in tiny fonts. In similar cases the transition to an ideograms-based user interface would be beneficial, yet challenging to implement on a communicative level.
A possible solution, in terms of design idea, is the UI and UX philosophy behind this ingenious external controller of macros with key bindings:
Stream Deck has fully customisable LED matrix buttons, as for the icons that they project.
In my opinion, this might be a viable approach to mimic in software (or maybe even in the enclosure’s hardware) in a possible future Zynthian graphical interface, with a configuration app embedded in webconf.
In such an implementation, the functional meaning of the icons would be fully manifest to the user, because he has performed himself the connection between a visual sign and the related procedure, thus establishing a personal code of operation, which does not need to be interpreted and that the brain would recall easily. Needles to say that this UI design paradigm would save a lot of screen space, simplifying communication and affording the simultaneous control of different functions.
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Hi @wyleu! Unfortunately, I does not seem to be allowed to access the BBC-Radio 4 Paolo Baldi’s content from my European area…
Thanks anyway 
This is a common theme these days. Even Apple UIs from company that was main promoter of simplicity 20 years ago suffers the same.
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Some good observations here, thanks. We should avoid overly complex UI that may be challenging to comprehend or use and which might add to CPU load. We should avoid UI that places form over function. And any UI design should be focused on providing significant benefit.
I believe that the listboxes can be difficult to use with touch. I am often selecting the wrong entry and when I increase font to ease this problem I encounter other issues with screen layout. I think that providing a larger, finger friendly UI will benefit all touch users which includes V5. I often use the touchscreen on the V5 as part of a fluid encoder-button-touch workflow. If you can see the option you want on the screen, e.g. in a listbox, you may want to select it directly, e.g. by touch, rather than scroll to highlight then select. Whether the larger touch-friendly lists are larger font listboxes or grids of options is detail. There is (IMO) a problem to solve. This isn’t just style over function.
Regarding chain view, I believe it will be far more natural and intuitive to lay chains out in a grid than the current tree structure. The tree does provide the information but it is not as obvious as it could be and does not lend itself to dynamic configuration. Currently you have to select a processor, and nudge it up/down the tree one slot at a time. It would be better to see the chain and move processors dynamically. This could be done in the tree view but works requires substantial development effort which I would prefer to see targeted at delivering a more satisfying solution. A grid of blocks seems to me the obvious presentation. Each processor represented by one of these blocks could be selected then moved with encoders or dragged by touch. The audio and MIDI routing would be very obvious.
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Apologies.
The BBC is a much changed beast and will be missed when it’s gone.
No problem @wyleu 
During my time in England I warmed my heart to some remarkable BBC programmes, like the Opera channel with abundant early music content on BBC3, Dr Who on BBC1 and the engaging scientific series of Prof Brian Cox on BBC2.
Only to discover, once back in Italy, that little to nothing of this media material was available to watch from my continental area. I also went as far as asking BBC directly via email, and they politely answered that they never managed to strike a deal with the national Italian broadcasting agency (RAI), apparently because of not enough potential interest in the face of substantial fees required by the English counterpart.
Best regards
The creatives make the content.
The lawyers prevent it’s performance.
Technology tends to side with the lawyers.
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Sic transit gloria mundi
Regards!
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Hi @cfausto 
I think that, for UI designers in the coming years, it will be a real paradigm-shift challenge to decide whether to incline towards old-school but proven text or venture into forward-thinking icons.
I deem that there is no one-way answer for the moment, but probably a mixture of one approach with the other.
As for learning the Zynthian UI in a sort of “experimental protected environment”, there is already a handy workaround: you can buy yourself a (relatively) cheap 4 GB Pi4 on whatever e-commerce platform, connect an USB keyboard and mouse, an USB audio interface and any HDMI-capable screen to the tiny Raspberry SBC (even a standard modern TV set would do the task, but in a glorious Cinemascope form factor), and you are ready to go with your Zynthian workflow simulator!
All best luck, and best Xmas wishes 