Radiotracker's UI

Radiotracker is a program for recording of online radio stations. It was offered by the CHIP magazine for a free download as part of their advent calendar for 2009. The installation process was slow—it installed an additional library without asking, required a system restart and then the program took long to load. After the interface was loaded, the following came out (without the list of stations):

Lessons learned

If we disregard the installation process, the user interface is the first thing we see in a new desktop software. One that is hard to understand and learn, immediately lowers our acceptance and puts the program at risk. Too many user interface elements are not valuable, but confusing.

A lack of emphasis on important UI elements led to inability to determine the true purpose of the software on the first look—if it is a recorder, player, music organizer, burner or media converter. Because it tries to be all in one, it fails so greatly.

Conclusion

Software makers should be interested in the way people use their software and which functions they prefer. This allows to make the user interface as simple as possible and improve its usability.