• From: Los Angeles
  • Registered: 2007-12-09
  • Posts: 16

Topic: Chumby's UI Flow

I love what my Chumby can do, but I find the UI flow to be a little awkward. It seems pretty clear that the switch at the top of the Chumby is reserved for quick access to the control panel, but having to exit the current widget to access the control panel seems a little strange. This makes navigating through widgets very cumbersome.

Why don't you have an overlay displayed when you press the top button allowing access to the most commonly used menu items?

Maybe something like this:
[img=http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/2097/chumbyui01tj0.th.jpg]

The buttons on the mockup are for:
Volume
Favorites (music, widgets..ect)
Control Panel
Next Widget
Previous Widget


You could also include things like a clock or access to music from this tool bar.

  • From: Chicago, IL
  • Registered: 2007-11-11
  • Posts: 235

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

Grimace,

I really like this, it puts the most common items one tap away. My personal preferences would be to remove the favorites and have a music play/stop button. I am just trying to think of items that currently take multiple taps/squeezes - such as volume, play/stop, etc.

-HuckFinn
  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,200

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

...and therein lies one of the thornier problems.  Everyone wants different things to be one tap away - some want widget navigation, some want channel changing, some want music controls, some want volume/mute, some want clocks, etc.  Often we have the same people wanting to do different things at different times. By the time you're done, what you end up with is back where you started.

There's little doubt that the current design could use some improvement - but we've collected all of the suggestions from the forum and there's virtually no consensus on what should be the "one tap" functionality.

You end up with "one tap" means "do what I'm thinking at this moment" and we didn't include the necessary telepathic hardware because it was too expensive.

Effectively, this is the problem - "things aren't important until they are important".

For instance, why clutter up a screen with a volume control once you've set the volume to a comfortable level?  Well, often when you need to change the volume, it's must be done quickly and easily - but the rest of the time it's just sitting there taking up pixels.

Similarly, why clutter up the display with music controls when I want to do widget navigation - but then again why clutter up the screen with widget controls when I just want to change the music?

Duane's Website

  • Registered: 2008-01-08
  • Posts: 172

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

Well, some things are never going to be settled. Personally, I would like that top button to make large amounts of money appear in front of me, however, I doubt that the fine folks at Chumby Industries could manage that.

  • Registered: 2008-02-16
  • Posts: 17

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

...so why not make the button configurable by the user, so everyone can decide what's 1 tap away?

6 Reply by huckfinn (edited by huckfinn 2008-02-20 14:01:14)

  • From: Chicago, IL
  • Registered: 2007-11-11
  • Posts: 235

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

Duane,

Is there a way from the server side to see what people are doing most on the control panel? Just as you mentioned, different people do different things with their chumby - but if you could get some statistics on usage you could then design the control panel for what the majority of us are doing. If you can not see these things from the server side, maybe a poll on the forum where we rank what is most important to each of us.

To me the things I wish were only one tap away are...

-Volume slider
-Stop/Play of current music selection, with it remembering the last selection for future play
-Brightness toggle ( this need would vanish if I could control this by the alarms )

I would gladly sacrifice the "Send", "Rate", "Delete" buttons, maybe move them to Channel Info panel. Again this is purely my opinion based on what I do with my Chumby. All of these actions I would do from the web gui and moving them to a more buried menu on the Chumby may solve the accidental deletion of widgets by passers-by or the little-ones. Plus (again my opinion) it makes sense to have these in the Channel Info panel. I like the layout of the channel info panel, but hardly have a use for it now.

I would also sacrifice the "Hide Control Panel" button as this can be done by tapping the picture of the Chumby screen or the top button. It seems overkill to have all these ways of getting out of the control panel.

-HuckFinn
  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,200

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

huckfinn wrote:

Is there a way from the server side to see what people are doing most on the control panel? Just as you mentioned, different people do different things with their chumby - but if you could get some statistics on usage you could then design the control panel for what the majority of us are doing. If you can not see these things from the server side, maybe a poll on the forum where we rank what is most important to each of us.

No, we don't monitor that behavior for privacy reasons - we might someday instrument a Beta Control Panel in that fashion (after making it crystal clear we're doing so), but I don't see us doing that in production.

I'll talk to Product Management about some sort of poll.

Duane's Website

  • From: Los Angeles
  • Registered: 2007-12-09
  • Posts: 16

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

Nice. Thanks Duane.

I also look forward to that telepathic hardware in Chumby 2.

  • From: San Francisco, CA
  • Registered: 2007-11-01
  • Posts: 98

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

Cool, I was putting together a similar idea as well. 

http://www.jforsythe.com/jforsytheblog/ … board.aspx

I didn't think of adding favorites, I used "pin" as to allow the user to pin the current widget before it expires on them.

-John Forsythe
www.jforsythe.com

jforsythe's Website

  • Registered: 2007-11-09
  • Posts: 38

Re: Chumby's UI Flow

this is a great idea