User Experience and Rockbox- A rethink required?

[adityabhandari]

Rockbox is an amazing and powerful achievement. I own an iPod video 5g and for me, rockbox was a godsend that allowed me to break free from itunes and its tyrannies.

As much as I love rockbox, I have to say that while a great amount has been accomplished in terms of functionality, the user experience has not been paid due attention. The user interface is very, well, developer like :].

If we want rockbox to be truly embraced, even by the non-technical users, we need to give the user-experience a rethink, and not just a facelift.

As a trained usability engineer, I am very interested in collaborating with people interested in taking forward the UX cause.

[GodEater]

Can you give us your design then for how you'd do it please?

We often get people coming in here saying they don't like the user interface - but no-one ever offers any actual improvements.

[Llorean]

One thing worth remembering - a lot of the usability hindrances (such as crowded button maps or the basic list-based user interface) are also strengths in other ways.

The user interface is very developer-ey because it was designed by developers who actually use these players, and want powerful access to many features. While this leads to a UI that requires some learning, I'm sure it would be frowned upon if replacement ideas simplified things at the cost of some of the power advanced users expect to be at their fingertips.

The relatively simple text-based view also allows the UI to easily be driven blindly with the addition of voice prompts, and any future UI ideas should remember that a not-insignificant user group is sightless or visually impaired.

[AlexP]

And we don't want to remove or hide options (unless the same functionality can be achieved in another way).

However, as GodEater said - we are open to improvements, but nobody who says the interface is bad ever actually gives any workable solutions (other than silly things like remove half the options, or make it like an ipod etc.)

[linuxstb]

I too would be interested to know more specifically what you don't like about Rockbox's current UI, and how you think it can be improved.

You need to consider Rockbox's limitations though - it runs on many different devices, each with different LCD types and (more importantly) different numbers of buttons, and buttons with different names printed on them.

In order to make Rockbox development (and support) more manageable, we want Rockbox to behave as consistently as possible across all these different devices.  We wouldn't want to have to maintain 20 different UIs, each optimised to work perfectly on one particular device.

For an idea of the range of devices Rockbox needs to run on, see here:

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DeviceChart

Don't be put of by the slightly negative replies you've been receiving - it's simply because you're not the first person to say what you're saying, but no concrete proposals have ever been made.  I wish you luck!

[adityabhandari]

What a response! Thanks for all the info. Here are a few of my doubts/comments based on what has been mentioned so far. Please bear with me if you find them to be childish or uninformed. I ask them with the intention of encouraging more discussion :-

@linuxstb "it runs on many different devices"- I feel final optimizations still need to be in place. However, we can bring some sense of consistency across all platforms by adopting common UI patterns. Can someone give me information regarding the display options available on B/W players, e.g., for color screen players we can use jpgs, what do we use in case of B/W players? Also, do we support .svg/ .png graphic files? If not, would we, in the future?

@AlexP:"we don't want to remove or hide options"- By default, nothing should be hidden, but I guess, we can atleast give the user the choice to decide what he wants to see/hide? E.g.: my ipod 5 g doesn't support recording and hence I have no use for it, I want to hide it.

@Llorean: "lot of the usability hindrances (such as crowded button maps or the basic list-based user interface) are also strengths in other ways"- crowded button maps?? Also, I am not against the list-based UI, it's nice. I just feel that we can work to enhance the already existing UI.

@Llorean: "powerful access to many features..."-The access needs to be in place, for sure, that's what Rockbox is all about! However, these UIs can look and work better. E.g. Text Entry in ipod 5G is certainly not very convenient, to put it mildly. Also, the "graphical equalizer" does offer advanced control over the sound but isn't very easy to use. It doesn't do much in terms of informing the user(especially a novice user) about the meaning of say, "LS" or "PK1".

@GodEater: I intend to provide UI mock ups of my suggestions.

[torne]

Features such as recording *do* only appear on players which support them. The iPod 5G is perfectly capable of recording, the line-in pins are on the dock connector.

Is the manual's description of the graphical equaliser not sufficient? There really isn't room to go into a detailed discussion of what the EQ settings mean on the device, especially on devices with small screens...

[AlexP]

@linuxstb "it runs on many different devices"- I feel final optimizations still need to be in place. However, we can bring some sense of consistency across all platforms by adopting common UI patterns. Can someone give me information regarding the display options available on B/W players, e.g., for color screen players we can use jpgs, what do we use in case of B/W players? Also, do we support .svg/ .png graphic files? If not, would we, in the future?

The UI is already consistent across devices, and things like bmp backdrops, jpeg album art etc are supported where possible.  Other formats are unlikely, these are limited resource devices.  I strongly suggest that you try out other players using the simulator before making any suggestions.

@AlexP:"we don't want to remove or hide options"- By default, nothing should be hidden, but I guess, we can atleast give the user the choice to decide what he wants to see/hide? E.g.: my ipod 5 g doesn't support recording and hence I have no use for it, I want to hide it.

Configurable menus are a huge bag of worms.  Search for previous discussions on this on the forums, IRC and the mailing list.

Normally features that are not supported are not offered, torne beat me to why.


We need actual idea here, not just that something isn't nice.  And please read the manuals/check the sims first, so you don't suggest things that already exist/are done.  It'll also help you to get an idea of what is possible across targets.

All that being said, we do want improvements (we have just got rather cynical that anyone will actually do anything other than list what they don't like

[Llorean]

Can someone give me information regarding the display options available on B/W players, e.g., for color screen players we can use jpgs, what do we use in case of B/W players? Also, do we support .svg/ .png graphic files?

We use bitmaps, not jpgs. See the themeing options, no graphics should really be incorporated into Rockbox itself. .svg and .png are somewhat unlikely. You shouldn't be thinking of UI improvements in terms of graphics - themeing options exist for graphics. You should be thinking in terms of usability.

E.g.: my ipod 5 g doesn't support recording and hence I have no use for it, I want to hide it.

Actually, your player does support recording. Features that are useless aren't included to save RAM.

crowded button maps??

Many people complain about the fact that there are sometimes different features on a tap of a button compared to holding it down, or that some features are activated by pressing multiple buttons simultaneously.

It doesn't do much in terms of informing the user(especially a novice user) about the meaning of say, "LS" or "PK1".

These are terms someone familiar with equalizers would know, and it's not really possible for the UI to explain technical details, just like it doesn't explain "bitrate" or "sample rate" for recording users. If these need explaining they should be in the manual. It's not really the place of the UI to educate users.

Remember that it's also bad to waste RAM. You can't just include everything everyone might want in the UI. These players have limited processors and limited available memory and there's generally a benefit to using as few total resources as possible (with RAM being, generally, more freely available than CPU time).

[adityabhandari]

These are terms someone familiar with equalizers would know, and it's not really possible for the UI to explain technical details, just like it doesn't explain "bitrate" or "sample rate" for recording users.

Actually, I was wondering about how much of a performance issue would it be if can display a kind of a tooltip which would inform the user about the intended usage/description of the item. Also, I think that space would not be an issue in most players, there's plenty of it available in mine below the equaliser UI. On a side note, a reason why the equaliser is hard to understand could be that it doesn't look anything like a real equaliser would look like! Most of them are vertical as opposed to the horizontal layout in Rockbox.

The Tooltip feature could be used in several places, but not ALL, it could prove to be a valuable enhancement, but only if used judiciously.

Is the manual's description of the graphical equaliser not sufficient?

Good design helps us to understand a product- the user should not have to rely on the manual.

crowded button maps??

Oh! I am totally sold on the versatility of these babies. They give the user so much more power, especially at their fingertips . They need not go away. However, we could look into reasons why people face problems while using them and take a call if we indeed need to change this feature or not.

I strongly suggest that you try out other players using the simulator before making any suggestions.

thanks alex, I will. I hope they're all as easy to get up and running as the one for ipod 5g video.

[Multiplex]

I always struggle with the idea that something we use frequently should be intuitive - actually I think that the opposite is true - you're going to use it frequently so it is worth your while getting to learn how to use it and be able to use the thing to its greatest capability.

Driving a car is hardly intuitive but we almost all take the effort to spend weeks or months to master the user interface, same for the keyboard in front of you now.

I don't want a dumbed down useless Rockbox - there's the Original Firmware with its pretty, but useless, pretend GUI for folk that like that.

[AlexP]

Tool tips are horrible, they really slow you down and get very annoying.

Your ipod video has one of the biggest screens (in fact the biggest of the standard targets) - most do not have plenty of room at all.

[adityabhandari]

I always struggle with the idea that something we use frequently should be intuitive - actually I think that the opposite is true - you're going to use it frequently so it is worth your while getting to learn how to use it and be able to use the thing to its greatest capability.

Driving a car is hardly intuitive but we almost all take the effort to spend weeks or months to master the user interface, same for the keyboard in front of you now.

I don't want a dumbed down useless Rockbox - there's the Original Firmware with its pretty, but useless, pretend GUI for folk that like that.

Agreed, I am also not aiming to propose designs that dumb-down the beast that we have.
Products that are designed for first time use, ie, to accommodate even the dumbest of the users, get used only once.   And we're aiming to streamline rockbox for the fairly advanced users only.

Tool tips are horrible, they really slow you down and get very annoying.

Your ipod video has one of the biggest screens (in fact the biggest of the standard targets) - most do not have plenty of room at all.

Probably the reason why it's UI looks as if it's been designed to cover only half the screen
Nevermind, it was just a suggestion, my recommendations would not come in before I've been through all the simulators

[Llorean]

Actually, I was wondering about how much of a performance issue would it be if can display a kind of a tooltip which would inform the user about the intended usage/description of the item. Also, I think that space would not be an issue in most players, there's plenty of it available in mine below the equaliser UI. On a side note, a reason why the equaliser is hard to understand could be that it doesn't look anything like a real equaliser would look like! Most of them are vertical as opposed to the horizontal layout in Rockbox.

Tooltips then require another button to pop them up, screen real-estate (the iPod you use has one of the largest screens, most players have far less), either RAM use or disk accesses when they're loaded. And those are just the obvious drawbacks.

As for how it looks, most of the players have screens wider than they are tall so the equalizer more readily fits rotated as it is. Are you really saying that it's confusing to users that something has simply been rotated?

Good design helps us to understand a product- the user should not have to rely on the manual.

It is physically impossible to design something above a certain degree of complexity without requiring reading. Including tooltips in the product is just a way of disguising the manual as the software - for something you use regularly and want to keep lean isn't it better to keep them separate and individually efficient?

[AlexP]

Also, keep in mind that Rockbox isn't a product.  Sure, we would like people to use and enjoy it, but we don't have to go for the lowest common denominator in order to chase sales. 

I keep trying to counter my negative points with positive ones, so here goes again - we do want it to be as good and easy to use as possible, but the primary focus is the developers.  I think we can expect people who decide to replace the firmware on their players to read a little if needed.  They absolutely have to for the install at the very least.