Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas
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!
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