Overview improvement

Oh I like the accordion thing... That should actually be pretty easy to do now that the day listings are built by views... I bet you could do that with the views accordion plugin: http://drupal.org/project/views_accordion

One of my goals before a 6.x-2.0 release is to have a Views based now playing block. It would make it a lot easier to do just this.

We've searched around for UI concepts on schedule grids and one that has some interesting elements is on Tivo.com here:

http://www3.tivo.com/tivo-tco/tvlistings.do

If we have the grid available as a view we could create some of this functionality like you all describe with views accordion. It also displays "next program information" -- which isn't clear to me how you can achieve that with the current station feature set. Would love to know how that would best be accomplished as the "future episodes" don't yet have an audio file.

I think the Tivo menu looks really good and has some very cool features but the purpose seems pretty different. It answers the question "Given all these channels, what do I want to watch now?" Where I think the Station Schedule is trying to answer the question "What's on this station this week?" So we'd need to do some major adaptation or just look at stealing features.

Drewish, Just some food for thought here on UI design.

On my site, the main page displays the schedule. Originally, I had requested that we make an monthly schedule so that it is easier to maintain the radio shows because my radio shows are not weekly. Some are monthly, some are weekly, some are alternate weeks, etc.

A monthly schedule would make it easier to maintain and possibly make it more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. However, a week schedule takes up quite alot of space on my site and I'm sure that a monthly schedule would be even worse.

This leads me to try to figure out ways to make it much more aesthetically pleasing. I want to first acknowledge that I do understand that we are solving the question "what's on this station." My site does not have station archives, so I'm really focused on listing what's on this station and when. However, I can see that others might be interested in providing a better UI for finding not only the what's playing now, but the archives.

That being said, I do like the tivo menu idea and the accordion. I think they are good input on making a drupal site look fantastic using the station module.

Another excellent example of a station schedule is BBC Radio 1 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1) or BBC Radio 1Xtra (http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra)

I really like the "Now Playing/On Air" block that they have. It has an image of the show, the name of the show, the times of the show, what's playing now (the song/title) and a listen link.

I think that would be a great model for us.

As far as the schedule, they have so many shows that they only list a daily schedule, which is interesting. They don't attempt to display a weekly or monthly schedule it appears.

However, they list shows/schedule by genre/category which looks very nice and pleasantly aesthetic.

The individual program nodes on Radio 1/1Xtra also list a right column block which shows related shows (based upon genre/category). 1Xtra seems to do this a bit better than Radio 1. I like this concept.

I know this is quite alot of input to consider with the direction of the station module, but I think the visual way we present the schedule data and how to make that efficient in regards to real estate and the aesthetic is worth discussing and thinking about especially in the age of web2.0.