>1. We have a partnership with RadioTime to provide us a customized
>feed of internet radio stations, that's why they are special.
>
I thought as much.
So, dependent on the level of partnership, you weight the menu choices. Over
time, they will change weightings, and hence menu position due to each provider
wanting better advertising?
>I think they do a great job.
I agree.
However, it would be nice to be able to configure menus; to get rid of the Talk
menu or the By Region radio, the only option is to totally disable the whole
RadioTime plugin.
>2. We found that new users couldn't find the stations they were
>looking for, especially the Local stations.
I can see that adding Local stations to the higher menu could be useful for
beginners. However, this requires the user to have set up a RadioTime account
first to configure what "Local" is. And before setting up a RadioTime account,
the user needs to set up a SqueezeNetwork account... If they can manage those
steps, I'm sure they could figure out how to drill into RadioTime to find local
stations.
Having defined what "Local" region the user is in, is there a need for "By
Region"? I never use that.
>They had no idea where to
>begin and were forced to wander around aimlessly to find stations. So
>we promoted the general categories up from under RadioTime.
>
Some instructions for beginners would be useful then. Perhaps add some extra
help pages, eg. "Help > Internet Radio > How to find radio stations". You
can't keep adding everything to the highest level to make everything easier. I
think the whole thing will be harder now, as there's too much to scroll through.
>3. Rather than hiding the popular "webcasters" one or two levels deep,
>we decided to promote them to the main list so that new users would be
>able to discover them easily.
>
The webcaster is hidden now, whereas it wasn't hidden before. It was directly
under "Internet Radio > RadioTime". On the SB3, browsing into "Internet Radio
> Local" or "Internet Radio > By Region", the user wouldn't know they are going
into RadioTime.
>4. We also decided not to distinguish between aggregators (Shoutcast)
>and content providers (RadioIO), and list the brands together, making
>it easy for folks to find the names that they recognize and discover
>new ones.
>
It would be nice to aggregate radio stations from all content providers
together. Plugins could provide extra information to populate the internet
radio station database, but would also appear as they are today but under a
Browse by Provider sub-menu. eg:
Internet Radio
Browse
Local Stations
By Name
By Genre
By Location
By Region
Browse By Provider
Live365
RadioIO
Shoutcast
Search
That would require getting a list of feeds from each provider from time to time
and aggregating the lists into the database. You could weed out duplicates
based on the url of each radio station.
>5. The Squeezebox (player and controller) UI is generally better at
>helping users scroll through lists than exploring hierarchies.
>
I disagree. The web UI is better at seeing long lists, as there is more visual
height and a scrollbar.
The Squeezebox UI is better with hierarchies for drilling down into something
quicker. And long lists are easier to navigate if the lists have some known
order (not random, and not changing each release).
Phil
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