I stumbled across this Reddit thread the other day of intentionally terribly designed volume control UIs, and there is some truly awesome UI work at play. And to be clear, I mean "awesome" as in, they will leave you full of awe. Is there another word for that?
I may be extra in-tune with this right now since I've been doing a lot of recording, and finally spending money on fancier audio plugins that are designed to streamline and simplify the process of controlling your sound. Waves Audio, for example, has an entire series of "one-knob" plugins that have exactly one knob that alters exactly one element of your digital audio recording, and they are genuinely fantastic.
But these … these ain't it. They're still awesome in their own way, though. Like this:
I am partial to this one, however:
This one's actually hell:
This one's kind of fun, in a cruel way:
And this one … this one has levels, man.