First of all I would like to thank Nokians for their support and suggestions, especially the whole bunch of UX experts on Saturday who sat with us and bombarded us with suggestions and concepts

Martin Grimme (pycage) and I sat down on Friday in Barcelona to improve and enhance the interface of his application - the FM Radio. In the mean time we gave two interviews each, but that's another story

For those who don't know the situation, here's a quick re-cap:

Nokia does not ship an FM Radio application by default on the N900. The FM Radio chip is disabled by default and it's a part of the Bluetooth chip. I will hazard a guess and say that the FM Radio was never a part of the feature-set for this device and that's OK. We have the community to re-enable this hardware and provide support for it.

We attended talks about concepting and UI design, so that helped us *a ton*. With basic knowledge freshly acquired, we tried to improve what we already had. This is the story:



We first tried to figure out how to communicate the unfortunate fact of having to automatically enable Bluetooth every time you use the FM Radio, how to propose a simple auto-scan as the first-run wizard, how to show auto-scanning to the user, how to inform him/her of various other situations (offline mode, user actively disables Bluetooth while radio running).

Then we tried our hand at improving the UI along with UX. We decided to remove the Play/Pause buttons altogether, as well as get rid of the notion of "Favourites". When you run FM Radio, the radio starts playing, if you shut the application down radio stops playing. Favourites are now just "Stations". We have RDS Name and RDS Info implemented already, Martin will just move the display around a bit and fix a few remaining bugs with that. RDS Info will be displayed above the frequency scale and the RDS Name will be displayed on the large button at the bottom. Tapping the large button will pop out the list of saved stations. Names will be taken automatically from RDS, but can be changed manually, the list will be alphabetical by default, but we might make it more configurable later.

The buttons on the sides no longer scan, they switch between saved stations, they will be made larger.



We also tried our hand in concepting the portrait mode. You have to read that sheet from right to left, you'll figure it out. The concept to implement is simple. RDS Info above, then just two buttons for switching between presets just under your thumbs, big button with RDS Name and a short Stations list below that. Tapping the big button will expand the Stations list.

The menu (doesn't matter in which mode) will have options for Auto-scan, Manual (change frequency just like with FM Transmitter, so you don't have to swipe), and in the future - Profiles support (for different places different sets of saved stations). We're also thinking (key word being "thinking", no plans or UI concepts) about time-shifting and recording.

So at the end of the day I drew our concepts yet again, this time more carefully, to show them to UX experts on Saturday.



This is a sheet before consulting:


And after discussions:


The UX panel also figured out a way for us to implement Profiles support:



Profiles were the most difficult to figure out (switching, editing, viewing, re-ordering, etc.), but I think we now have that covered, I won't be going into detail, but it's going to be pretty freaking cool.

I don't think I've covered even half of the stuff that was discussed on Saturday, but... you should have been there

Martin has a lot of work ahead of him now, but at least now he knows the details and can plan ahead.

This was a very fruitful weekend. If you have any questions feel free to ask, I'll try answering them tomorrow.