Let me start by saying that I'm very much impressed by akai effort and results in force. Clearly, there are some excellent solutions, and this ever growing list simply reveals the endless nature of this process rather than weaknesses of the teams or blueprint.
I am very new to this device, so please forgive any obvious oversight. That said, I've been making electronic music long enough to develop an intuition for workflow. Or so it seems to me.
Below are my improvement proposals, largely based on the best of push, live, elektron and novation.
They are all flow oriented, meant to enable musicians to stay in their trance as they play, which does not resemble that of technicians creating menus. There is plenty you can do while in this perceptual tunnel as long as the machine facilitates but doesn't interfere.
When in clip mode, changing the loop length with the big rotary in one bar increments, when you go down below one bar, you end up with a fraction of the bar, which is arbitrary and probably hardly ever useful.
When in the middle of playback this gives you some stutter. The worst follows. To recover from this you need to address this fraction now. Even when you do the playback will be out of sync for this clip until you further address it by restarting. The simplest solution would be simply not to go below one if you are doing one increments. Logical and neat. If someone has a need to take chances with stutter they can do it purposefully by entering the desired value manually.
When tweaking loop start and end, getting off the grid and then back on should result in realignment with playback. You don't fiddle with these during live shows, this is a strictly technical operation and able to have got it right. Each time you change these parameters the playback would most logically just be recalculated to a position as if these settings were from the very beginning.
This also applies but more vividly to when trimming a clip. Even if the loop plans is aligned, trimming the clip gets it off sync. It might do to preserve the sync of the whole project, but be soon recalculated to save the show.
Create a new clip view looks like undercooked with some on-screen menu buttons for arrange grid clip list don't snap nudge and so on not being functional or relevant. It is also wasteful of the real estate of the screen. You can't actually see where you are in the matrix so you have to remember it and the button launch matrix won't help. It's good to be redesigned to actually show the matrix and also there would be some good use for the arrow buttons here for navigating the matrix clip selection so after this stage you can select the destination of the recording.
Just like left side panel, settings should only cover part of the screen on the side of the clip matrix. The only thing that justifies their width of the menu that present is a lot of space for the clip title. The clip title field however could be contained in a very small space because unless you click it and rename with a pop-up with a pop-up keyboard, it doesn't contain any information useful at this stage. What you need to know instead is the coordinates of the clip the track maybe it's title and the scene. None of these needs much space horizontally.
Long pressing the launch button on screen could pop up a menu just as it does for a clip. Insert and capture, and all that stuff.
Select, edit, copy, delete buttons to work with screen presses as with button presses. It can't be a hardware limitation from a can it?
Select button to work in combination with matrix screen presses, also when peeking into the matrix screen menu. It would be very useful to be able to select the clip from the screen without triggering it or re-triggering in some strange moments, the select button is readily there to be used for that purpose. Especially for during playback when after pressing clip you find out your not in any clip just want to get to the one that's playing without retriggering or stopping it.
When in mixer effects adding a plugin, you want to get straight to the gui of the selected plugin. If you flip back to the effects menu you have to get out of flow, refocus, identify the plugin that you've just added and get into it.
In our vintage filter, the LFO rate of 16t is lacking.
When doing a delete a clip, clip matrix is not showing. This is an oversight apparently as even changes to track volume are undone with the shift of you to the mixer.
Deleting a clip doesn't mean you want to get to that slot.
Left slide panel content is a waste of real estate. You have clip matrix , navigate and the mixer buttons at hand, even pad mixer. So the whole menu appears to contain just a browser that is useful. The menu itself being a great idea, and there could be a right menu as well, it would really help to sit down and think what is most needed that is not accessible with buttons. It takes a slide to get there and it partly only covers the previous menu. Perfect for some peek and run functionality. As such it should also be accessible when on plug-in gui and any other viewer screen.
Also the content of left side panel is duplicated in the menu button menu. This advocates for some dedicated content that benefits from retaining the view of the previous screen. Add a clip as well as add and record a clip to the selected slot would be my first choices (greyed if the selected slot is busy).
In step sequencer, the white light indicates both selected pad and muted or soloed pad. Ideally muting and solowing should differ from all available colors and from one another. Maybe that colour which is used for the as-pressed velocity?
Shift + delete + clip button to erase all content of a clip without deleting the clip. Perfect for me the clips of certain length that you don't want to change. If this is an audio track such a clip could be either simply deleted or replaced with a dummy silence clip if it makes sense for any purposes.
Mute, solo, record arm, clipstop momentary upon long pressing, as with novation. Brilliant. When in mute mode you may want to check which clips are playing (clip stop) and keep muting. In the midst of doing clip mutes you may want to record arm a track but stay in the mute dept. Perfect for making tracks on the fly .
Navigate mode, big knob could navigate vertically, or horizontally with shift.
In on-screen clip settings menu launch quantization options changed by the big knob are ordered from higher to lower. Could be more logical progressively, with global available at both ends so you don't have to traverse the whole list to get to the obvious. Or you could make it endless with the first following the last and the other way around.
Likewise in the input channel in sampler and looper. Input 1 2 might be the the default but immediately to the left of it might be resample.
Also resample a single track would be very useful for recording a solo to the accompaniment of all the tracks on force.
Launch or stop selected clip without even peeking into matrix would be very useful.
Immediate unquantized stop and also start of a clip for the be very good, for stopping unwanted clip or starting a drone clip slightly off the grid as well as for some lucky incidents.
Another option, with a different modifier button, start immediately but play it aligned with the beat. Great effects both with audio and plug in tracks.
When selecting effect to insert, imagine you want one of the vintage effects Which is the last group in the list. Having all of the proceeding menus expanded, that's a lot of scrolling or collapsing the preceding menus. Replace the first item 'none’ with collapse/expand all.
Copy button could also copy notes in step sequencer .
In step sequencer, press and hold a note might allow nudging and modifying the velocity.
another dead akai project 
