Re: Feedback Wanted: UI of FM receiver GsoC project

Hi Hamza,

love it! Would leave out the song cover display, to be honest – showing the textual RDS
info is enough for almost all users, and you'd need not care about fetching covers. And I
don't know where you'd be getting station logos from; to the best of my logo, RDS doesn't
transmit logos.
As such, I think your channel list might be relying too heavily on the station icons being
visually distinguishing elements! And these icons don't exist in the radio transmission!

I'd rather have a larger (RDS terminology) *Programme Service Name* being displayed (it
can only be 8 characters long!) or *Long Programme Service Name* (LPS, when available,
<=32 UTF-8 characters), with the frequency found displayed below in a smaller font, and
maybe the *Programme Type* (PTY) and *Programme Type Name* (PTYN) when available. I think
keeping space for a (later) signal strength indicator would be cool, too.

Something like:

___ ___ ___ ____ _ ___ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _
| _ ) _ )/ __|__ (_) | __(_)__| |_(_)___ _ _ __ _| | / __| |_ __ _| |_(_)___ _ _
| _ \ _ \ (__ / / _ | _|| / _| _| / _ \ ' \/ _` | | \__ \ _/ _` | _| / _ \ ' \
|___/___/\___|/_/ (_) |_| |_\__|\__|_\___/_||_\__,_|_| |___/\__\__,_|\__|_\___/_||_|

🯱 🯰 🯰 .🯰 🯰 MHz 📶███████▒░░░ Education / Bringing you the coolest fiction!


(of course, not as ASCII-art, but I didn't have my graphics editor handy.)


I'm not sure what a "play" (▶) / next (⏵|)/ previous (|⏴) button does in a radio receiver?
If you mean "jump to next/previous found station", then please use vertically pointing
arrows instead of left and right – your station list is vertical, too!
(I'm still not sure what the "play" button does in a radio receiver – it's not a cassette
player!)

I don't specifically like the spotify UI (my media player software is kind of the opposite
of spotify in so many ways), so I'm not very qualified to critique the overall design.
But: you have a lot of space around your channel list and waterfall display, so I'd
suggest you make the buttons beneath as large and easy to hit for even someone
shortsighted as possible, and make the volume slider have a large, easy to see "handle": I
really think that the common loudness sliders where the user needs to know that they can
drag the end, without the end actually having a visible "knob" is a design mistake, as
I've seen *multiple* people fail to try doing that, because common UX expectation is that
things your can interact with are somewhat "button shaped".

The "heart" icon seems to be "blindly stolen" from spotify and cannot serve a purpose on a
radio receiver, so I'd strongly recommend removing it.

Best regards,
Marcus
On 6/4/25 10:20 PM, Hamza Mohammed wrote:
> Hi everyone! As part of my GSoC project, I've been working on an FM radio app, and I just
> finished the first layout draft—would love your thoughts!
>
> Main features:
>
> *
>
> *Debug view*: FM receiver controls like sampling rate, filter size, squelch, gain
> (still working on this part)
>
> *
>
> *Home page*: Auto SDR detection, frequency scanning, channel listing, multi-stream
> recording with RDS (station info, song titles, etc.)
>
> *
>
> *On-demand flowgraph control* for better performance
>
> The UI is kinda Spotify-inspired. I've attached sketches and Figma mockups—let me know if
> it's missing something, looks off, or just feels boring. First time designing an app, so
> all feedback is welcome!
>