Today, managing the user experience (UX) for listening to the radio in the car goes far beyond ensuring a clear, crisp sound.
That means it’s a whole new world to navigate when it comes to making sure stations are properly rendered within car infotainment systems.
We covered a legal battle one U.S. broadcaster is pursuing as a result of wrong station metadata being displayed in his Porsche, for example.
But Nick Piggott of RadioDNS and Gregor Pötzsch of CARIAD are among those working to make sure stations have easier options to properly reach drivers.
Piggott and Pötzsch spoke during the final session of the one-day WorldDAB Summit 2025 in Antwerp, Belgium. They explored the issues with in-car radio and explored solutions.
WorldDAB is the global advocacy group for the DAB+ digital radio standard.
Logo logistics
Pötzsch is product owner of radio for CARIAD, Volkswagen’s automotive software group, and also chair of the WorldDAB UX Group.
Citing his own car as a testbed, Pötzsch noted a number of UX issues affecting in-car radio. He cited missing or outdated station logos, the lack of a dedicated “radio” button and poor metadata projection.
Piggott, RadioDNS’ project director and vice president of WorldDAB, then highlighted two new websites designed to address in-car radio’s UX issues.
“The best way to communicate with designers is to reach out to them in the kind of language and design they understand,” he told the WorldDAB audience.
In doing so, Piggott is helping to develop UXguidelines.org, which he described as a soup-to-nuts resource for designing a user interface that best supports radio’s features in a vehicle.
With the added importance of station metadata feeding a dashboard display, WorldDAB is seeking to address graphics-based problems facing stations through a second website being developed as WrongRadioStationLogos.com.
[Related: “Radio Must Fight for Its Car Dashboard Placement”]
Its purpose, Piggott explained, is to empower listeners to identify incorrect logos themselves, as well as allow the stations responsible to fix the errors.
Ultimately, he said, the goal is to reduce the number of incorrect logos over time to near-zero because the process itself reached a point of efficiency.
Android Auto inconsistencies
But working with OEMs can also be a sore spot. Pötzsch highlighted the struggles radio faces integrating with Google’s Android Auto, specifically with inconsistent logo displays.
It’s something, he asserted, that “everyone” in Europe is finding the same gaps with, for both DAB+ and FM deployment.
Google, Pötzsch lamented, can be slow in responding to requests for modifications. He used the analogy of “really big super tanker” that takes a long time to respond to course changes. Google prefers to listen to their own OEM customers, he said.
But in seeking solutions, since Android Auto is open-source software, he said that a GitHub repository has been created as an open-source haven for developers to contribute code to fix the gaps.
Regulatory momentum
WorldDAB is focusing on these efforts at a time when governments are moving to mandate radio’s continued prominent position on car dashboards. “It’s originating from Germany but already picking up momentum all over Europe,” Pötzsch said. “It’s really important to tell the users and the customers about the most important stations.”
Piggott said it’s all about blending what each individual country seeks while also making decisions on what radio stations exactly want to prioritize on the dashboard.
“We need to look at how we can harmonize that so that the solution that we are producing for broadcasters and for manufacturers is contiguous across all the countries that it needs to be applied in,” said Piggott, “not done awkwardly or piecemeal in each country.”
Watch the WorldDAB Summit session below:
