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I will have a screen with a Video in the lower right corner that is playing. One the screen behind the video there will be an audio channel that can be played. Only one of these streams can play at the same time, so only audio and no video or only video and no audio.

enter image description here

One thing to note, is you can't come to this screen unless the video is already in the corner. It will most likely be playing.

There are a few ways of approaching this, if the video is playing and a user turns on the audio:
1) The video just stops playing
2) The video closes and goes off screen
3) There is a message to the user telling them they can't have both playing at the same time.

I believe it is good practice to communicate to the user when they can't do something, but not sure if it has enough value in this case.

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  • I was wondering if maybe you could give us a little more information about it in order to determine what is more important. For instance, what is the video playing in the foreground vs audio in the back and why? That way we could try and prioritize the actions. Thanks!
    – Charles
    Mar 19, 2014 at 18:16
  • Sure Charles, the audio will be a live stream of a car race and the video is a live stream of the same race.
    – Xtian
    Mar 19, 2014 at 18:23

2 Answers 2

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Here is what I would do. And to make tabs visible, I would try not to stretch tabs making them equal to the width of video container. I would use them the way they are shown.

enter image description here

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You don't have to use visual cues to make this apparent to the user before things happen. Users expect it's either one or the other. What you need to do when one channel is playing and the other channel is requested to play is to pause the other channel and represent the paused state with a play image:

enter image description here

Don't close the video screen and don't make it disappear. Make it possible to start again with just one click.

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  • 1
    Nice points. I think I agree with this approach
    – Xtian
    Mar 19, 2014 at 18:25
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    I was thinking very much the same thing here. Just allows the user to alternate between what is playing. The only thing I would add, just in case, would be maybe something along the lines of "play live stream" or something since it's not really starting a video from the beginning but continuing to pick up from the current live feed. I might be overthinking it a bit though. :) Just something to be aware of.
    – Charles
    Mar 19, 2014 at 20:22

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