User Experience

This page is new and likely to grow quickly. Please do contribute to it. Edits can be made quickly as a guest or you can sign-up for a wiki account which is useful so contributions are properly attributed.

Request for help posted: https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/jobs/2021-02-07-gnu-radio-design-contributors-wanted

Joining the conversation

UX work is currently focused on the GNU Radio Companion and the main website. The project hasn't made UX a particular focus or value in the recent past so most current contributors do not have habits, processes, or experience in evaluating and improving the usability of the software beyond basics like shortcut keys and API consistency. If you see something that seems like it could be improved, it probably can. We're eager to learn from folks with experience, to extend our community, and to support efforts that haven't been emphasized before.

The main conversations of the project happen on the Matrix based chat system. If you already have a Matrix account you can join the main room at #gnuradio:gnuradio, and each sub-project below lists a chat room. If you do not already have a Matrix account then you can make one at https://chat.gnuradio.org

Projects

• Improving GNU Radio Companion (GRC) usability
• Main Website
• Project visual identity
• The Comprehensive GNU Radio Archive Network (CGRAN) Website

Join the GNU Radio UX Studies group

You can join the GNU Radio UX Studies group.

GNU Radio Companion

The GNU Radio Companion (GRC) application is the most significant graphical tool that most users encounter in the project. It is a tool that enables users to create custom software programs by clicking and dragging blocks, visually connecting them, and setting values in the blocks. This connected set of blocks is called a flowgraph and is the core functionality of GNU Radio. The application ships with a moderately sized library of core blocks and an extensive variety of third-party "out of tree (OOT) modules" are available which can be installed to add new blocks.

GRC is continuously under development but the user interface has been stable in it's present form since ~2007. It is currently implemented with the GTK toolkit, but to improve future maintainability, reduce dependencies, and hopefully improve it's appearance (especially cross-platform) it is being ported Qt. This means now is a particularly good time to revise its workings and appearance.

Improving GNU Radio Companion (GRC) usability

Chatroom: https://chat.gnuradio.org/#/room/#grc-dev:gnuradio.org

https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/tree/master/grc

Iconography Review: https://pad.ei8fdb.org/p/gnuradio_iconography_review

General notes and visual mockups: https://www.figma.com/file/Kamm7DNiDsMJmB9GYOvFKB/GNU-Radio-Redesign?node-id=0%3A1

Main Website

Chatroom: https://chat.gnuradio.org/#/room/#website:gnuradio.org

https://www.gnuradio.org

https://github.com/gnuradio/hugo-website/

Project Visual Identity

We're fortunate to have had some great graphics work done in the (fairly distant) past so our project logo, wordmark, and color scheme are distinctive and generally pleasing. The project is continuing to mature and is increasing the amount of interaction and outreach it does with businesses, government organizations, and other formal bodies. As a general design project it would be useful to have a standard set of templates for documents.

https://github.com/gnuradio/gr-logo

CGRAN

The Comprehensive GNU Radio Archive Network website is the central location for users to find plugins to GNU Radio which implement new blocks and entire wireless systems components.

https://www.cgran.org/

https://github.com/gnuradio/cgran