Sound-Indicator should provide more advanced options

[Pablo Marlasca]

Device: BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition
OS: Ubuntu 14.10 (r20)

I really love the new experience with the scrollable indicators at the top panel. They give the possibility to have a lot more room for each category while being easily accesible. This is why each indicator should take advantage of this and put all the screen size into good use. Sound indicator is one of those. I'll explain:

When you scroll down the sound indicator, it just gives you the option of "volume" level. But this is a bit confusing as you don't actually know if you are changing the volume for incoming calls, notifications, music/games, alarms... So I think this should be "expanded" and provide different controls for each category (as I show in the mockup pic I attach).

If this was implemented, the user would be able to easily change the volume and vibrating for each type of alert: calls, notifications, media and alarms. Easy on the eye, accesible with one touch even from blocked device. Simple. No need for complex "Priority" or "At work" or any other modes as in other OS.

Activating "Silence mode" button would just make the four categories mute and vibrating-less, and inactivating the button the controls would just revert to their last previous state. If from silence mode you activate one vibration or level up some volume, the button would automatically turn off as there is no silence mode any more.

Hope you can implement something like this soon in future system updates, since it's really needed to make basic sound settings much more clear and easy for the eye. As Shuttleworth would say, "Sound settings at your fingertips" :)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Quite often when a bug report has the word "should" in its summary, the actual problem is left unstated, or at least underanalyzed. The problem, as far as you've stated it, is that when you change the volume, "you don't actually know if you are changing the volume for incoming calls, notifications, music/games, alarms". That may be a real problem, and if there's evidence that it is, there are several possible solutions. But the particular solution of providing separate sliders for each would be unlikely to help, for three reasons.

First, the design implies that you can meaningfully set volumes in advance, but this is unlikely. Some media are much louder than others, some games are much louder than others, and some callers are much louder than others. The only one that you could set meaningfully in advance would be alarm volume.

Second, because you usually can't meaningfully set volumes in advance, when you are wanting to change the volume of something, quite often you are in a time-sensitive situation. When an alarm goes off, you may have time to click the hardware volume keys a few times before dismissing the alarm, but you're much less likely to have time to navigate into an indicator menu and find one of four sliders before people start staring at you wondering why you haven't turned the alarm off yet. Similarly, if you start playing an action game but realize it's too loud (or too quiet to hear instructions), you're much more likely to be able to hit the volume buttons without crashing/dying than you are to be able to use an indicator menu without crashing/dying (if the game even lets you access the indicators at all).

And third, even people who aren't in time-sensitive situations will usually use the hardware volume buttons rather than the sliders inside a menu, simply because the hardware buttons are much easier to get to. Mainstream phones are unlikely ever to have more than one set of hardware volume buttons, so we can't avoid the problem of having to calculate what it is that people want to change the volume of.

If the problem you describe is a genuine problem for many people, we could solve it in a much simpler way: by having volume notifications label which role (e.g. "Alarm", "Call", "Media") has just had its volume changed, instead of the current design of only showing which output (e.g. "Speaker", "Headphones") has just had its volume changed. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound#notification>

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The opposite of this bug report is bug 1441819, "The sound indicator is a bit cluttered".