Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas
User Experience and Rockbox- A rethink required?
GodEater:
--- Quote from: adityabhandari on December 18, 2009, 09:04:23 AM ---It's always better to know what segment we are designing for. It will also put to rest claims that it is mostly developers who download and use rockbox.
--- End quote ---
I don't think I saw anyone claim that we thought it's mostly developers who download and use Rockbox. The issue is though that the developers design Rockbox for themselves, not for users. We welcome users to come and use our toy - but it's our toy, designed by us, for us.
--- Quote ---And based on facts, we can create a sort of persona for the 'average' rockbox user whom we can further design the product for.
--- End quote ---
We don't design for the average rockbox user though - we design it for us. If the 'average' rockbox user finds it useful, great. If they don't, well - no-one's making them use it.
Now, we're still not claiming that the UI is perfect, but too many people have arrived at www.rockbox.org, tried it out, and liked it's features, but not the UI. In most cases this is because they got used to the original firmware of their player before they came here. Many of the "old hands" here disagree with people who claim the original iPod firmware is "intuitive" or "easy to use". It's not. It's just that more people are used to it. The assumption by those people is though that we'd want to change our interface to be more like player X's original firmware, but with all the features that Rockbox offers. This is simply not the case.
Llorean:
Just to tack on to Godeater's post. I think many of the developers agree that the UI could be improved, possibly significantly. The key point is that the target audience is always going to be the people making the software, so improvements for other audiences need to not take away from what the developers are getting out of the software.
So there's no objection to improvement ideas. Just bear in mind that it seems like developers designed the UI because they did design it, and a lot of choices were made to suit the target audience - themselves.
nls:
--- Quote from: GodEater on December 18, 2009, 09:48:50 AM ---Many of the "old hands" here disagree with people who claim the original iPod firmware is "intuitive" or "easy to use". It's not. It's just that more people are used to it.
--- End quote ---
This is so true!
I have recently started using my firs ipod after years of only rockbox players and the interface often leaves me guessing which button to press and trying at random.
I think a better and less intrusive way to have hlp tesxts is a menu itme in the context menu, that shows a "help screen" with relevant help text, will require that users know about the co text menu but it's such an important feature of our UI that they will eventually, I hope.
Biont:
--- Quote from: ew on December 17, 2009, 10:33:27 AM ---- The tool tip would be some additional text that would be displayed along with a menu item.
- The tool tip text would be displayed as defined in some new wps token.
- Tool tip placement and use would be up to the theme developers
- Perhaps tool tip text could be added as an element to language files, thus allowing languages and customizations as desired (I am sure there could be some humorous ones as well)
--- End quote ---
I am no developer and I am lacking an artist badge, but I must say that I really like this idea. This could well be implemented in sbs-supporting themes - maybe (optionally) after a timeout. If we leave it to the themers, there are no problems with the plain default menu.
It would be hard to implement this feature on devices like the sansa clip, but I already used a rockboxed clip and I think its interface is a lot better that the current Cowon D2 interface (YMMV)
The D2 and the iPod Video however would allow for much more on-screen information that could even be displayed in a separate "window". And there sure are more devices that would be capable of this
So if you really need to stress people to RTFM: Leave it to the devices that can't suport the tag because of the screen size.
Usability!
tdb:
I am not a dev and very pleased with Rockbox. UI could be more intuitive for the novice user , but there are so much settings you can adjust in Rockbox I doubt it will ever be possible to make it easy for everybody.
What I would like to see though, is a method to adjust the UI myself. I have given away on of my rockboxed Clips to my mother and she is not very technically savvy.
By hiding the menus and settings she will never use it will become easier to navigate.
She will not need playing lists, adjust settings, radio, plugins, system etc.
The only thing she needs is bookmarks, files, resume playback and the sleep timer. The rest of the menu is bloat and more confusing for her.
If it would be possible to change a configfile or mark/unmark the menu entries in rockbox that would be a very nice option. People could configure their own UI then.
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