Notices

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.

Thanks for this, but can you thumbnail those images in the post and link to the larger versions elsewhere?

Thanks Tomasz, this is a great summary of what was going on in Barcelona. I still have the concept sheets with me and start work when I no longer feel so tired from the long evenings in Barcelona anymore.

You did a great job at concepting the UX/UI in Barcelona! Now I owe you a beer.

The UI experts from Nokia were great, too. Barcelona Long Weekend was very fruitful! Thanks to Nokia for sponsoring me!

Here's a quick video demonstration of fairly recent code

http://tabletui.wordpress.com/2009/1...adio-for-n900/

Maemo has tons of software that need the help of UX "experts" and you're cosing the app that is already under my coverage to discuss? Without even asking/involving me? Great.

We were looking at those concepts as well wazd, we took them into consideration while completing our concept. We already have the ruler UI. "Favourites" make no sense at all, considering the auto-scan feature saves all available stations, not only your favourite ones, but the "Stations" UI is very similar. The last visual concept is impossible to make. Martin is also not willing to provide a web service for locations list downloading, even forgetting the fact that that the whole idea wasn't a good one in the first place (always out-dated lists, some areas will never get a good list, the need for Internet access possibly abroad, etc.). We have thoroughly considered many options, we have a plan that Martin is following. If you have any further suggestions, please don't hesitate to add them.

I wasn't even aware of any animosities here, I'm not sure why do you put the word "experts" in quotes. We had a very good session in Barcelona with UX experts from Nokia and we used that time to fullest extent possible. I'm not sure if I see anything wrong with that. I don't really care about other applications at the moment, so I'm not even sure where you're coming from with the "other apps need help" argument.

I think you have a strange entitlement issue. It's Martin's project, not yours and definitely not mine. If Martin decides to ditch everything and re-do the app from scratch this hour, I won't blame him. If he decided to do the UI completely differently than any concepts, it's still OK. OK?

Any chance of adding plus and minus jog buttons that would move the frequency the minimum possible in the indicated direction?

Having tried the early version of the radio, I found the swipe a little imprecise for fine tuning and this would have helped a lot!

There will be a an option for manual tuning like you tune the frequency of the FM Transmitter or set the time for the alarm. I don't think we'll add +/- signs, as this is a much less used feature than switching between stations (and the buttons for this action will be made much larger).

The use case is as follows: kwotski wants to find and save the stations in his area. He runs auto-scan, auto-scan searches through the whole frequency range and saves stations (using RDS for names). Kwotski then switches between stations using big buttons on the sides, renames stations as needed and deletes stations he doesn't really want.

Swiping is just a toy at this stage, it is imprecise and form over function, but damn it looks good. That's why we are "working around" this toy

When will this newer package be available in the repos?

Ok, thanks.

Although, my actual use case is: kwotski knows the approximate frequency of the two stations he's interested in listening to, swipes to the vicinity, and spends irksome minutes re-re-re-re- and re-swiping to try and land on the optimal reception frequency..

But I'll be happy to work round your improvements If the radio works (and it does, gloriously!) that's enough in the end. After all, once the right frequency is saved the game is largely won.