Online Survey on Usability and User Experience of Music Notation Editors

Although one can see a certain convergence between the interaction designs of different notation editors, there is no general consensus or standard since new interaction paradigms keep appearing with most major software updates or new products. In this paper, we present the results from an online survey (n = 138) with standardized usability and user experience questionnaires. The users of digital notation editors were asked to fill out the System Usability Score, the AttrakDiff2 and the Liveness questionnaire. This provides insights into domain specific design problems with the goal to inform the design of future interfaces. Almost all music notation editors show clear deficiencies in overall usability. Furthermore, a detailed examination of the obtained metrics show specific dependencies of individual qualities, which are helpful to conduct further qualitative research.