40 replies to this topic

[Troutmonkey]

Lets face it, the UI has some big problems. But there is hope.

These small fixes will greatly improve the everyday user experience, and each can be implemented by one programmer in less than an hour.

#1 Mech Details button

Why is it so far over to the right? The mouse travel is crazy. When in the store you have to click on the mech, then move all the way over to the right to click details, then all the way over to the left again to click back. Why not put a Mech Details button next to the buy/configure button?





#2 Mech Details back button

On top of that why does the back button always take you back to owned mechs, even if you came from the store? Make the Mech Details button go back to exactly where you came from.



#3 Mech Details summary

You know that handy little summary that shows the mechs speed, firepower, and armour? Yeah. Why the heck does it go away when you go into the details view, you know, where all the details are meant to be. Add it there too



#4 Colour Picker

Whoo, not Mech Details again. Now I have a widescreen monitor, a HD one in fact. For some reason PGI though it wise to limit the color wheel to less than a quarter of that screen real estate. For goodness sakes, make it scale with screen size!



#5 Chat Notification

I really, really don't care when someone joins or leaves unit chat. Don't make the chat light blink so much. It's essentially useless now because it's always blinking.



#6 Instant Hover over

Make every single hover element instant. The time between mousing over a weapon or item and the items details appearing is far too long

#7 Add Hover over to Mech Details

Ha, mech details again. What's the cooldown on my LB10X again? Do I really need to press back, then Configure mech, and then click right arm (or was it left?), and then hover over the LB10X to find out it's range? No, just add the hover over information to Mech Details and call it a day.

#8 Make it spin, anywhere

Can I see my mech? Then let me spin it. Absolutely no reason for me not to be able to spin my mech at any given point in time.

#9 Show only ammo for equipped weapons

Why are you trying to sell me Guass ammo when I only AC5's equipped? You already warn me about unused ammo types, so it shouldn't be a problem to only show ammo for equipped weapons.

#10 Show how much equipped ammo there is

Currently outside of remember the ammo per tonne, and then counting up how many tonnes you have in mech details, there is no way to see how much of each ammo type you have equipped. This needs to be shown somewhere.

#11 Consistency between selections
If I go to my Stalkers left arm and select "missiles", and then move to my Stalkers right arm it should already have missiles selected. Likewise should apply to all equipment types, it just adds so many clicks. Likewise, dragging a component off of a mech shouldn't switch the selected category to that type. If I'm removing heat sinks to equip an AC10, I don't want to have to reselect the Ballistics category.

#12 Promote Group Leader
When in a group the leader is the person who created the group. If that person leaves another player is randomly chosen. The only way to promote someone to leader is for everyone to leave the group and get re-invited. This is especially painful if the new leader doesn't have all the current party members added as friends. A simple context menu for the current group leader should allow them to right click on another group member and promote them to leader.

#13 Remove unneeded prompts
Yes, I know that I just cancelled match making. Yes I know I just purchased a mech. Yes I know I just upgraded that skill. Remove all useless prompts, and replace with a notification that requires no interaction if there really needs to be something there at all

That's all I can think of for now, but that's just a small example of the many small improvements that would make our lives that much easier. PGI have been doing great of late, but I want to see more! Go get those low hanging fruit before they go rotten!

#14 Remove uneeded scroll bars
Why the heck do we need scroll bars under title selection? Expand the categories out fully and just have one scroll bar on the right

Edited by Troutmonkey, 04 March 2015 - 03:31 PM.

[Killstorm999999]

I agree a million times about the mech details back button. That's one piece of low hanging fruit that should get picked right away.

[Glucose]

Nice work with the images. I agree with all of those.

I would throw on one additional thing -- when BUYING mechs allow the user to select it so they can see the 3D model on the right side. It would increase sales if they could do a rotation of a mech they don't own yet.

[KhanCipher]

Glucose, on 08 October 2014 - 04:40 AM, said:

when BUYING mechs allow the user to select it so they can see the 3D model on the right side. It would increase sales if they could do a rotation of a mech they don't own yet.

you can, if you're buying from the mechlab.

[Tristan Winter]

Great stuff!

[Glucose]

KhanCipher, on 08 October 2014 - 04:48 AM, said:

you can, if you're buying from the mechlab.

Then it must not work the same from the STORE?

[Troutmonkey]

Glucose, on 08 October 2014 - 05:13 AM, said:

Then it must not work the same from the STORE?

Store is pretty useless. To be honest I've never been since first checking it out in the UI2.0 preview

[Tarogato]

OP, I support all of your points. Little things like this could work wonders for user experience and they should be pretty easy to code in.

Bump for approval. Hope these changes are considered.

[Troutmonkey]

Added some more points

Quote

#6 Instant Hover over

Make every single hover element instant. The time between mousing over a weapon or item and the items details appearing is far too long

#7 Add Hover over to Mech Details

Ha, mech details again. What's the cooldown on my LB10X again? Do I really need to press back, then Configure mech, and then click right arm (or was it left?), and then hover over the LB10X to find out it's range? No, just add the hover over information to Mech Details and call it a day.

#8 Make it spin, anywhere

Can I see my mech? Then let me spin it. Absolutely no reason for me not to be able to spin my mech at any given point in time.

[TexAce]

#9 Why cant I see the Mech I want to buy on the right side, when I hover over it??

You want me to judge its looks by looking at the tiny thumbnail?

Edited by TexAss, 13 October 2014 - 03:12 AM.

[Duke Nedo]

Would be nice if the sorted the mechs in a matrix-format: give one row to each chassi and stack the variants in columns. That would tidy up the mech bay a lot!

For the weekend challenge I really had to search for where I can select match mode. Had I not known it exists I would never have clicked there...

Most annoying thing is the load times when making a small change to a mech... dunno about what bandwidth they allow for this traffic, but during the time it takes to remove a module could download an episode of Game of Thrones, really....

[Troutmonkey]

Quote

#9 Show only ammo for equipped weapons

Why are you trying to sell me Guass ammo when I only AC5's equipped? You already warn me about unused ammo types, so it shouldn't be a problem to only show ammo for equipped weapons.

#10 Show how much equipped ammo there is

Currently outside of remember the ammo per tonne, and then counting up how many tonnes you have in mech details, there is no way to see how much of each ammo type you have equipped. This needs to be shown somewhere.

#11 Consistency between selections
If I go to my Stalkers left arm and select "missiles", and then move to my Stalkers right arm it should already have missiles selected. Likewise should apply to all equipment types, it just adds so many clicks. Likewise, dragging a component off of a mech shouldn't switch the selected category to that type. If I'm removing heat sinks to equip an AC10, I don't want to have to reselect the Ballistics category.

#12 Promote Group Leader
When in a group the leader is the person who created the group. If that person leaves another player is randomly chosen. The only way to promote someone to leader is for everyone to leave the group and get re-invited. This is especially painful if the new leader doesn't have all the current party members added as friends. A simple context menu for the current group leader should allow them to right click on another group member and promote them to leader.

#13 Remove all unneeded confirmation prompts
Yes, I know that I just cancelled match making. Yes I know I just purchased a mech. Yes I know I just upgraded that skill. Remove all useless prompts, and replace with a notification that requires no interaction if there really needs to be something there at all

New entries

Edited by Troutmonkey, 21 October 2014 - 04:26 AM.

[Rhaythe]

Only thing I disagree about is the DETAILS button right next to the BUY button. That's UI design 101 - you don't want people accidentally clicking BUY when they mean to click something else. It's a way to piss off your customer base.

As for the rest, brilliant post.

[Kiiyor]

I... just want it all to work like Smurfy.

[Sjorpha]

One of the most frustrating things when building mechs is the extremely convoluted process of having a subsection for each body part, this is extremely bad UI design. It shouldnt have to take longer building a mech in game than in smurfy. Make a mechlab with with a paperdoll overview and text menus so it can all be the same screen. The fancy graphics and icons get old after less than 15 minutes when they come at the cost of lost efficiency.

Make an interface for dragging and dropping modules directly between mechs in the mechlab, it's a hideous chore to, between each match you want to switch mechs, open up the configuration screen, strip the modules, going back, selecting another mech, opening configure screen for that, opening modules submenu, and then finally putting the modules into place. Phew, 7 switches between different UI windows for something that should be 2 clicks in 1 window. For other equipment I get the idea of creating incentive to have multiple copies, but modules are so expensive that no one ever does that unless they have reached the point of having more cbills than they need, so in this case it ends up nothing but a waste of user time.

Add a filtering option for owned equipment to all categories, especially important for modules, and then you can also remove the "are you sure" prompt for buying stuff. And of course filter ammo by equipped weapons, is there even one situation where you'd want to equip ammo for unequipped weapons? Nope, it's pure clutter.

Add separate scrollbars for camo and each colour, so you don't have to do the extra step of switching between them. you have plenty unused screen space for the camo editor. Also free multidirectional rotation of the mech and mouse wheel zoom would be nice, so we can look at our camo from all directions and distances.

Lots of more stuff...the UI is honestly the worst aspect of the client. It should be a lot more streamlined with focus on function over graphics, think efficient standards based web design.

[Sjorpha]

TL:DR :

Kiiyor, on 21 October 2014 - 04:39 AM, said:

I... just want it all to work like Smurfy.

[MechWarrior849305]

Drag-and-drop, please. Double click to install/uninstall component. Yeah, yeah, Windows (C-R-TM) users must die and so
TONS of absolutely identical icons for weapon skills, likewise for weapons.
Large laser anyone? - three waves. Medium? - two waves. Use some brains to look @ how it was made even in a decade old game MW4...

Edited by DuoAngel, 21 October 2014 - 05:13 AM.

[Blakkstar]

The last patch actually helped the UI a fair amount, so props to PGI for that.

Yeah, toss Smurfy a couple grand and integrate his building tool. The current one where you can only work on one location at a time stinks. Look at a TT Mech Record Sheet. The ability to see the entire critical chart while making modifications is pretty important.

And really, OWNED equipment and weapons please! Nothing like scrolling through 50 different engines and trying to find the tiny little white number that shows you own one.

[kapusta11]

PGI should take a look at NFS (U, U2, MW) UI, it is so simple that you can navigate there with keyboard alone.

[Ultimax]

Great post. The UI and overall experience using it is still very poor.