The “Runnin’ With The Devil” UI

dlr
The Diamond Dave soundboard (updated link) is getting a lot of heat in the blogosphere lately. Taken from a recently unearthed isolated vocal track of David Lee Roth singing “Runnin’ With the Devil” in the studio, this website provides clickable buttons that trigger various DLR vocal stylings. If you listen to morning radio (and hey, who doesn’t) and hear DJs making prank phone calls to pizza joints using clips from Rocky movies, this is the type of thing they are using – a soundboard.

I really love how the interface takes a fresh, honest (and hilarious) approach to foreshadowing, i.e., giving an indication of what’s going to happen (you might also think about this as feedforward, the complement to feedback). What will happen when you press a button that says “Whoo!”? The first time you try it, you learn very quickly what happens. Once you grasp the basic model (which takes one risk-free moment), the button label descriptions accurately (if cryptically) indicate what the result will be.

I love the idea of a UI with the following controls:

The ahh-hahs:
roth1
The whoo-hoos:
roth2
and of course my favorite
roth3

Sure, it’ll take more learning to distinguish between AHHH HAAAA and AHHHHHHH YEEEEEEAAAHHH and maybe the buttons should be clustered rather than alphabetical, with HHAAAAAYAAAAAAHAAAAH and the similar-sounding AHHHHYAAAAHH near each other. So it’s not perfect, and I doubt there will be a dot-one release to improve the UI along those lines, it’s still a fascinating example of breaking some rules (i.e., number of letters on a button) in order to deliver a better experience, in this case, one that stays very true to the brand promise.

Series

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