Marcum usability

Just picked up my LX-7, and am anxious to get it on the ice, but after playing around with with unit for a while and noticed some severe usability issues.

It may seem taboo on IDO to say anything negative about Marcum, but its also the place where the feedback is most likely to be heard by folks who can do something about it.

I would be happy to talk to Marcum more (I do work in UX), but my hope is that they consider the overall user experience in more detail when they release their next software. It’s painful in its current state.

Here are a couple of my early critiques:

Switching views: It is incredibly painful to switch views, from the full graph to the flasher etc. Not only do I need to go into each item and turn it off or on, but I need to turn the graph or flasher off before turning the other one on. Its a lot of steps, navigating through deep menus to make minor changes. Humminbird does this best with their hotkey, and custom views; but Lowrance’s ‘pages’ concept is pretty good too.

Menu transparency, and bumping the graph up: when you bring up the menu, it moves the entire ‘chart’ up. Not only is this unnecessary and confusing, but it moves the top off the screen so you can’t see the top of your range or which ‘showdown’ view is the zoom one. I would layer the menu over the chart (with some transparency) and make the menu structure more vertical.

Horizontal menus, with only up/down buttons: There are only up and down buttons, but all of the navigation/adjustments are vertical. It is very confusing to have the adjustments laid out horizontally (big number on the right) but only have up and down buttons. Also, since we are talking about water depth, most items should be laid out vertically as that is the mental framework most familiar.

Arbitrary numeric labels/scales: Why is everyting 1-10 or some other scale, and what do those numbers mean. It is confusing as to what these items do, and which direction is better. I really like the way that HB and Lowrance handle this behavior and give a visual indicator on which direction is more (for instance go and adjust the sensitivity on a HB/Lowrance and compare it to the LX-7).

The adjustments are slow and don’t give a good indication of movement.

Such markedly different behavior than other digital sonar units I have used (HB, Lowrance), or mechanical flashers (Vex, Marcum), and much different than any any other ‘app’ or digital interface I have used in a long time.

The LX-7 is still the best ice sonar out there, and if Marcum took a more serious look at the unit’s usability they would really improve the overall satisfaction people would have with the unit. They’re always talking about how they listen to their customers, here is some more input for consideration.

Good input!

It’s tough being all things to all people. You’re opinion counts here on IDO as much as it does on other Lake sites.

I’ll add my .02 worth of criticism to Marcum. (they do listen) Add a GPS to the LX-7…I have a camera already.

I agree that when you want to change the layout of the LX-7 scrolling through the menu can be a bit cumbersome; however as someone who’s fished with it for almost a year now I have to say that once you are on the water it actully fishes much more user friendly than even a flasher.

Yes, the first few times out you will spend a few hours playing around with it to figure out your preferred set-up, but I can virtually guarentee once you’ve choosen your preferred screen layout you will spend much less time pushing buttons on the LX-7 than you did adjusting your old flasher.

90% of the time that I used to spend adjusting my flasher is now gone with the LX-7 because of one simple feature… The dynamic depth adjustment which allows you to set your depth range once and then forget about it. For most of the other main reasons you would need to adjust the 7 there are hot keys (Zoom, IR, Cone Angle, etc.)

The bottom line is that while yes, theoretically the menus make it cumbersome to change the layout of your screen, in my practical experience on the ice you will play around with it for a few hrs, decide which screen layout suits you best (and this may even change from day to day/situation to situation) and then not spend any more time messing around with the menu while you are on the ice.

With all that said however, I did spend some time at the ice show discussing with the marcum folks the possibility of setting up a way for someone you could save a multiple layouts for your screen (ex – Walleye layout, panfish layout, summer layout, etc.) and switch to them by quicly pusing only 1 or 2 buttons. They were very receptive and I think there is a possibility that this type of functionallity will be coming in a future SW upgrade

Nice to see another UI guy here. I agree that Marcum has the best functionality but they could really use some UI help…techies are the last to think they need it and it shows.

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Just picked up my LX-7, and am anxious to get it on the ice, but after playing around with with unit for a while and noticed some severe usability issues.

It may seem taboo on IDO to say anything negative about Marcum, but its also the place where the feedback is most likely to be heard by folks who can do something about it.

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There’s nothing negative here. Or at least I see this as good, quality user feedback that can and will be taken seriously by the field testers and engineers. Thanks for sharing it. MarCum products have basically had a “menu” for about a year now. Given how far they’ve come in such a short amount of time I think they’re doing a very good job with the interface. Will it be refined in the future? OF course.

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Nice to see another UI guy here. I agree that Marcum has the best functionality but they could really use some UI help…techies are the last to think they need it and it shows.

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Exactly. You would think the success Apple has had over the last decade would show that tight integration between function and usability would go a long way.

As someone who works to build interfaces for human interaction I might be a little over sensitive; but we’ll put it this way — there is a lot of polishing left to be done.

Oh and the other kicker: The bottom on the chart and the bottom on the vertical display don’t line up on dynamic depth because the depth is displayed at the bottom.