Welcome to the eighth instalment of Meet Your Maker with Tim Harbour, Calrec's UI/UX Designer. So, what is GUI design, and why should we care?
1. What is GUI design, and how do you approach it?
The starting point for everything we design is to focus on our customers' needs: how they use our products and what they need to do with them. Our products should help them do a better job.
Context is important, so when someone is setting up a show or configuring a system, we focus on what they need at that point. When someone is in the middle of mixing a sports event or a news broadcast, we think about what they need at that moment, so the things they need are close to hand and easy to access at the right time.
We try to balance the needs of our different users, their different business needs and varying requirements at different times.
There are also ergonomic factors like the sizes of buttons, visibility of text, and ensuring there's consistency with the design of our physical products and with the DNA of our older products.
Our aim is to make everything as simple, clear and easy to use as we can, without losing any of the flexibility and power that Calrec products are known for.
2. We read a lot about the User Interface (UI) and the User Experience (UX). Which one is more relevant to Calrec, or is it not that simple?
It's not that simple. UI and UX are really closely related.
User interface (UI) design tends to be about the things we display on screen, and the finer detail of what those things look like and how they behave. Keeping everything intuitive and consistent across all Calrec products is important, but the UI design is just one part of the overall user experience (UX).
UX design encompasses much more. It's about listening to the people who use our products and finding elegant solutions to address their needs and producing products that live up to our values.
It's said that when design is really good, you hardly notice it at all. A good UX helps people do what they need to do. A great UX vanishes while doing it.
So it's both - you can't have a great UX without a great UI. They are both critical to provide our customers with the best possible experience when they use a Calrec product.
3. How does colour affect the user experience? Do you account for colour-blind or otherwise visually impaired people?
We use colour very intentionally at Calrec. We use colour to reflect different areas of functionality and that helps people quickly identify where they are and what different parts of the UI do.
This can create a challenge for some people because it can be difficult to tell the difference between things. Between five and 10% of people that use Calrec products will have some sort of colour vision deficiency, so one of the ways we continue to improve is by not relying solely on colour to communicate meaning.
A common example is to use red or green to represent on and off. It might seem logical to show off in red, and on in green. One small change, such as displaying a check mark in the on state, will help communicate on without relying only on colour. This example would be particularly helpful for people with a red/green colour impairment, but it actually helps everyone.
A lot of our work to improve accessibility is like that. Making sure that text is readable and understandable helps everybody that uses our products, not just people with accessibility needs. We are continually improving the accessibility of our UI design, so you'll be seeing more of these improvements come through.
4. How has the way Calrec users interact with mixing consoles changed? Where do you see this going in the future?
The adoption of AoIP has prompted many changes, but it has made the patching and configuration side of things a lot more flexible, more powerful, and much more complex. In the past, we would have a finite and carefully managed number of connections. The advent of IP has created effectively infinite and infinitely flexible connectivity, so our customers now have a whole new set of needs that come along with that.
Finding things easily becomes much more important. Making sense of large and complicated networks and managing that complexity becomes much more important, and all the while we need to maintain the key things that make Calrec products easy to use in operation.
We're working hard to bring that trademark Calrec sense and ease-of-use to increasingly complex and powerful environments.
Most recent headlines
11/12/2025
Dalet, a leading provider of cloud-native, end-to-end media workflow solutions, ...
06/12/2025
In a live broadcast from the Reagan National Defense Forum, L3Harris Chair and CEO Christopher Kubasik joined Morgan Brennan on CNBCs Closing Bell: Overtime. Ku...
06/12/2025
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. A new survey from Pixitmedia by Datacore revealed a major shift in the Media & Entertainment industry in media archiving, with 85% of resp...
06/12/2025
HACKENSACK, N.J. LiveU has announced that the national public broadcaster Czech Television has completed one of the largest LiveU live production deployments fo...
06/12/2025
NEW YORK The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) presented the Excellence in Production Technology Emmy Award to NASA+ and Dr. Tom Leight...
05/12/2025
2025 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Curt Gowdy Jr. - Master Storyteller, Nati...
05/12/2025
SVG Sit-Down: Veritone's Sean King on the Power of Mining Video, Audio DataThe company's Data Refinery offers users total control and governance over da...
05/12/2025
Platinum White Paper: Inside the Nashville Predators' Unified, Flexible, Sca...
05/12/2025
Netflix Reaches Agreement To Acquire Warner Bros. Following Planned WBD SplitThe deal does not include WBDs sports assets like TNT Sports (US, UK, LatAm), Euros...
05/12/2025
FOX Sports Returns to Indianapolis for Primetime Broadcast of Big Ten Championsh...
05/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Digital Engagement & Monetization Workshop Tackles the ...
05/12/2025
Atlanta United Lights Up New Emory Healthcare Studio With First Live Broadcast f...
05/12/2025
As Messi Takes the Pitch, MLS, Apple, NEP Roll Out Largest MLS Cup Production Ev...
05/12/2025
ESPN Enters College Football's Most Intense Month With Elevated Workflows fo...
05/12/2025
It's about that time! Awards season is in full swing, and the Film Independe...
05/12/2025
Every year, Spotify Wrapped offers a personalized look back at the audio that defined your year. It's a snapshot of your listening habits, designed to tell ...
05/12/2025
In 2025, Spotify's EQUAL, GLOW, and RADAR programs celebrated women, LGBTQIA , and emerging artists who turned moments into milestones. From breaking record...
05/12/2025
In our latest blog, we explain how Wi-Fi 7 rollouts can drive consumer loyalty with value-add services such as consumer cybersecurity. We also explore how this ...
05/12/2025
LOS ANGELES Netflix announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion....
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Nielsens Gracenote has launched Gracenote Content Connect, a new ad platform that provides agencies, brands, supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-si...
05/12/2025
NEW YORK In an most important update to the workings of deal-based programmatic advertising, IAB Tech Lab has released version 1.0 of its Deals API for public c...
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Pass the turkey. Pass the stuffing. Pass the cranberry sauce. All are common requests of Americans celebrating Thanksgiving Day with family and f...
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Iris, the new cloud-connected camera control platform, has officially launched with features that turn virtually any PTZ camera into a software-connect...
05/12/2025
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. Netflix announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion....
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Iris, the new cloud-connected camera control platform, has officially launched with features that turn virtually any PTZ camera into a software-connect...
05/12/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has approved AT&T's $1.02 billion acquisition of spectrum from UScellular in a decision that was issued sho...
05/12/2025
The Best Coldplay Songs: 21 Tracks That Shoot for the Stars From Yellow to Viva La Vida, Fix You to Paradise, this playlist goes back to the start.
December ...
05/12/2025
Zafris Lecture Series Brings Nabil Ayers to Berklee The 32nd annual James G. Zafris Distinguished Lecture series was held on Thursday, November 13, with guest...
05/12/2025
Introducing New Perks to Help You Get Even More from LinkedIn Premium Published on Dec 5, 2025 Categories: Company News, Product News
LinkedIn Corporate Co...
05/12/2025
Friday 5 December 2025
A new Game of Thrones Tale: Official trailer for Sky Exc...
05/12/2025
Back to All News
Don Lee, Lee Jin-uk, and Lalisa Manobal to Star in Netflix Act...
05/12/2025
Tis the season of giving once again and this year we've taken our Give Back Fridays' concept and turned it on its head.
In the autumn we were approach...
05/12/2025
Brayden Gogis doesn't remember a time when he wasn't completely fixated on games in all forms. In preschool, when they asked us to dress up as what we ...
05/12/2025
The Grinch steals the spotlight as the theme for The Late Late Toy Show 2025
Tune in tonight at 9:35pm on RT One and worldwide on RT Player
#LateLateToyShow...
05/12/2025
RT Announces New Presenters of Flagship News Programmes
New RT Six One News co-presenter Tommy Meskill
Sarah McInerney & Justin McCarthy join Morning Ir...
04/12/2025
ToolsOnAir Blackmagic Design HyperDeck Event Presets for just:in mac pro 2025 & ...
04/12/2025
ToolsOnAir AJA Ki Pro Event Presets for just:in mac pro 2025 & just:in linux
More Details:Starting with version 5.5, both just:in mac pro and just:in linux sol...
04/12/2025
Wangu Kanuri from Kenya and Godwin Asediba from Ghana are two of this years finalists for Thomsons Young Journalist of the Year Award. The pair are runners-up i...
04/12/2025
SVG Sit-Down: ProximaVision's Claudio Lisman on Why Tethered Drones Could Be...
04/12/2025
SVG Campus Shot Callers: Imry Halevi, Senior Associate Director of Athletics, Co...
04/12/2025
Platinum White Paper: LiveU Lightweight Sports Production: A Step Change in Spor...
04/12/2025
London to Riyadh: DAZN brings the boxing glamour to new production levels for Be...
04/12/2025
Analysis: Paramount bets on the battering ram' with Champions League play By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 - 10:12
Print ...
04/12/2025
Space City Home Network Launches SCHN DTC App for Astros and RocketsThe Rockets and Astros were previously the lone NBA and MLB teams without a DTC appBy Jason...
04/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Content Workflows Workshop Spotlights Evolution of Spor...
04/12/2025
New Sponsor Spotlight: Geotech's Patrick Wambold On the Unreal Engine Revolu...
04/12/2025
Curt Gowdy Jr. - Master Storyteller, Nationally and RegionallyBy Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.
Thursday, December 4, 2025 - 1:52 pm
Print This Sto...
04/12/2025
(L-R) Rebecca Lichtenfeld, Mohammadreza Eyni, Sara Khaki, and Judith Helfand att...
04/12/2025
SBS launches Future Frames initiative to support emerging First Nations video ed...
Welcome to the eighth instalment of Meet Your Maker with Tim Harbour, Calrec's UI/UX Designer. So, what is GUI design, and why should we care?
