6 replies to this topic

[Rosham Bo]

Amazing work giving us the AMS/ECM toggles. Long time coming and are already being used to save my ammo for those who really need the umbrella.
On the UI however, I honestly don't think you could put more redundant warnings on things.
"Are you sure you want to save changes?"
"Are you sure you want to exit"
"Are you sure? Are you Sure? ARE YOU SURE?

Come on, I know for newer players this has saved countless Millions of Cbills and stopped some real horrible loadouts created in a drunken blur from ever leaving the mechlab and seeing the light of day. This is good.

However for those who have been playing this game for a while it is, for me anyway, one of the most annoying aspects of this game compared to others I have played.
If I wasn't sure I wouldn't have done it. If I screw up, well time to put the bigboy pants on and either re-enter the match/game or make some more CBills to cover my drunken mechlab creations....
Would it not be possible to toggle them on and off similar to the tooltips?

Cheers,

[Quxudica]

Rosham Bo, on 10 September 2014 - 11:46 AM, said:

Amazing work giving us the AMS/ECM toggles. Long time coming and are already being used to save my ammo for those who really need the umbrella.
On the UI however, I honestly don't think you could put more redundant warnings on things.
"Are you sure you want to save changes?"
"Are you sure you want to exit"
"Are you sure? Are you Sure? ARE YOU SURE?

Come on, I know for newer players this has saved countless Millions of Cbills and stopped some real horrible loadouts created in a drunken blur from ever leaving the mechlab and seeing the light of day. This is good.

However for those who have been playing this game for a while it is, for me anyway, one of the most annoying aspects of this game compared to others I have played.
If I wasn't sure I wouldn't have done it. If I screw up, well time to put the bigboy pants on and either re-enter the match/game or make some more CBills to cover my drunken mechlab creations....
Would it not be possible to toggle them on and off similar to the tooltips?

Cheers,

The UI in general has a lot of redundant click-bloating. I like to refer to it as "Microsoft-syndrome". It's more complicated than it needs to be and information is cluttered. For example, why do I need to click multiple times, including multiple prompts, and then wait for a refresh when I unlock a single efficiency? It's unnecessary.

[Fut]

I used to laugh at people complaining about all the clicking and searching in UI2.0 - but I'm getting to that point now.
Everything is hidden behind multiple tabs/sections, everything has confirmation after confirmations...

From what Russ was saying though, PGI seems to be aware that the Interface needs work. So lets just cross our fingers and hope they give us what we're all hoping for (a la surprise AMS toggle)

[Quxudica]

Fut, on 10 September 2014 - 12:00 PM, said:

I used to laugh at people complaining about all the clicking and searching in UI2.0 - but I'm getting to that point now.
Everything is hidden behind multiple tabs/sections, everything has confirmation after confirmations...

From what Russ was saying though, PGI seems to be aware that the Interface needs work. So lets just cross our fingers and hope they give us what we're all hoping for (a la surprise AMS toggle)

At first glance complaining about having to click a few extra times will probably seem a silly thing to many people. However it's one of those seemingly inconsequential things that really does make more a difference than it seems to, and is a basic violation of the age old engineers motto and most important rule of thumb - K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple Stupid.

A good UI should offer the user all relevant information at a glance with the minimum amount of effort expended. The UI exists to facilitate the users interaction with the software first and foremost, aesthetic flourishes come second. When the aesthetic design of a GUI starts to impede the communication of information or the ease of executing actions, the G/UI has failed in it's primary function. If the GUI contains an unnecessary number of steps in the chain of executing an action, then the G/UI still needs slimming.

From the home screen it takes me seven clicks to unlock a mech efficiency, one of which is a completely unnecessary confirmation box after the refresh. That text box confirmation is redundant since the same information is communicated by graphical feed back - when the efficiency is unlocked it turns from grey to blue/green/orange.

Then you have examples of the UI aesthetic hindering the communication of information. When selecting a mech, an information box is presented at the base of the mechs feet. This box is small and translucent, overlaying the text on the animated smoke as well as multiple different background colors, obfuscating it. Additionally, where as the previous UI allowed the user to see the location of weapon hardpoints on the mech's 3D model by mouse hovering over the weapon type, 2.0 hides this information in the "Mech Details" tab on a visually cluttered paper doll. This tab serves virtually the same function as the old hover and highlight method, but is less visually interesting and adds a superfluous tab that serves no other function. meanwhile the information tab that appears now when hovering over a mech is dominated by three graphs that aren't actually all that useful while more important information is given much less territory.

UI design is best approached from a functionally minimalist perspective and, assuming something isn't horrendously broken, improving a GUI is often a process of iterative change to things most people would see as unimportant individually.

[PilgrimX]

Inside a match it's press esc and one click to exit the game.

Wait for that match to end and it's click logout, click exit, click confirmations that yes I really do want to exit.


It's stupid.

[White Bear 84]

Click click click click,
click click click
click click

Haiku.

[Xarian]

The waiting thing has to do with a data sync to the servers. I do feel that syncing every change is unnecessary and there are more efficient ways of handling things, but that particular wait is necessary for the way that PGI has implemented the mech saving features.

The UI shouldn't have 'are you sure?' prompts whenever no currency is spent, and could use a redesign for the sake of efficiency and information presentation (i.e. present more useful information, like mech hitboxes and smurfy-style layouts, etc).