Support and General Use > Theming and Appearance Customization

ONGOING DEFAULT THEME CONTEST!!!

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Llorean:
The difference between the "play" icon and the "stereo/mono" icon is that it if you've read the manual to discover the play/pause button, you will quickly understand what the play icon means because it will change states with the music.

Meanwhile, the stereo/mono icon changes no in reaction to direct user input, but often alongside signal quality. It can in fact show up for a station that is supposed to be in stereo because the signal is too poor and the device has chosen to use mono instead. Because of this there's not necessarily an immediately obvious way to tell what it represents.

The play/pause icon presents feedback for user input, while the stereo/mono icon is, generally, a representation of the status of the device or the signal, so at least some attempt should be made to make it communicate without context or with limited context, where play/pause will always have the context of user input alongside its change of state.

While I've seen the boxes above, I don't think we need the whole box (not having nearly as many channels, especially given FM radio) so the top line idea may be fine.


As to the circles being "far more common," I wouldn't say they are. In my experience, I've never seen those icons before in my life, while the box with dots is on a wide variety of electronics, DVD cases, and plenty of other stuff. So it may be more common where you are, but that's not necessarily true universally at all.

And again, a single circle without context is very, very meaningless. In the case that someone's only picking up mono, the icon just isn't going to be helpful. I still haven't seen a convincing reason why it needs to be an icon in the first place, honestly.

We could always use a stylized speaker for mono and pair of speakers for stereo, of course. Same concept as the circles, but with actual meaningful symbols.




I don't see how ascending bars would look at all similar to the volume icon (which is a single solid, rather than separated bars). An option would be to mirror the proposed icon though, so that at least the curve isn't in the same direction as the RSS icon.

Ezraghast:
I recognize the circles straight away. In any case, once they are described as representing 'stereo/mono' signal in the manual, then that is what they become. They're graceful I think.

Llorean:
Not everyone will have read that section of the manual. Especially given that the screen is supposed to be communicative, we should try to avoid making it necessary to use the manual to interpret. We could easily pick custom icons for anything, and use strange terms for options rather than ones that clearly tell what it means but there's a benefit to trying to minimize the requirement of the manual.

Graceful should be sought, but only if it doesn't interfere with usefulness - we should at least try to come up with an alternative that isn't likely to have a significant population asking "what's all this then?"

Ezraghast:

--- Quote from: Llorean on May 30, 2010, 08:27:24 PM ---...we should try to avoid making it necessary to use the manual to interpret. We could easily pick custom icons for anything, and use strange terms for options rather than ones that clearly tell what it means but there's a benefit to trying to minimize the requirement of the manual.
--- End quote ---

Lots of posts i read tell me to use the manual or read a sticky. Consistency would help

yapper:

--- Quote from: Llorean on May 30, 2010, 08:05:22 PM ---We could always use a stylized speaker for mono and pair of speakers for stereo, of course. Same concept as the circles, but with actual meaningful symbols.
--- End quote ---

Personally I recognize the circles as a stereo indicator (but maybe that is more common to Europeans than Americans?) but the use of speakers should be more obvious to everyone.

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