Stick with it over the weekend and see how you feel on Monday.

After some testing i was surprised how good actually the new UI is. It is really easier to work with new abstract icons instead of that old fashioned pseudo 3d icons. Transparency effect is really amazing! Finally i can see more of the space behind all windows. I hope you will keep on removing the excel-look and adding more of sci-fi look into the game!
What about negative feedback - there will be allways ppl who just stick to old thing despite of how bad they are and cant accept anything new. So dont let you discourage yourself by such posts.

You should make a screenshot of it and submit a bug report. This is the only way you can help with development, of course if you really want to help, because some people only want to shitpost on the forums make devs stop any progress they make.

You know what. I'll just leave it here.

Peek at it at your own risk. You HAVE been warned.

http://i.imgur.com/46oTyvO.jpg

Yes, there is a black and white option :D

Colour is nice, but I like my space in mostly black. I love the tiny edges of the windows, although I have no idea if they might be distracting in big combat situations (resemblig brackets too much)

Really like the new NeoCom icons, but I agree with people who argue it needs a little something more. I love the minimalism, but then again I'm a modern kinda guy.

Tough to decide how to add something without adding too much though. I was playing around with the icons on Photoshop, and I feel like my colours are too discordant with each other. On the other hand, I simply added some white lines to some icons (I especially like the email one), and I feel like maybe those lines aren't enough, or could be coloured.

As for the windows (haven't checked to see if this was already brought up), some themes such as green, Gallente and especially Amarr make tab text (chat window tabs, overview tabs, station services tabs) nearly unreadable due to the glow from the selected tab.

Finally, for the station services tabs, the number for number of guests seems to be cut off.

1. Colors in UI are used only by permission of CCP.
2. CCP knows better what colors are better for your gaming experience.
3. Obey and use only colors provided by CCP for your pleasure.

Station Services Window is missing. 2 different accounts, several log ins. reset all settings. Cleared cache. Window is still missing

The UI itself. I am puzzled...

- You have swapped the old (current) options in the ESC>General Settings tab with a number of presets. There were presets in the old version as well - and probably even more than in the new list? -, via the check box "easy theme selection", or the pull down menus, which basically do the same thing and even have fancy names).
- The old options are far more flexible than what is on offer now. They came with a total of three different sliders. This resulted in users being able to tweak the readability of their UI for just about any color setting on their screens (different models, different properties, different response to contrast, brightness, hue etc). With what you suggest now there are only a few of these presets that pass a readability test. I'm afraid this "new and modernized" version is actually worse than it was before and far less flexible. It's simplified, yes, but a lot worse than before.
- The Black preset is half okay-ish but not of the same quality as the old one, so is one of the blues. Readability is poorer than before. Colors on the windows also distract, while their backgrounds clash with the colors in space.
- Every window looks foggy because of the unwieldy window backgrounds, visibility in space with low opacity is worse than before.
- Moreover, windows with buttons like the probe scanner window have another issue, the light background inside the buttons totally nukes the contrast and makes the colors in the button icons fade. In the selected items window there is not enough brightness on the buttons that can be activated. Plus they have this annoying mouseover background illumination which again make the icon itself less readable (white on light grey) e.g. in the Black preset.
- The buttons in the selected item window are not sufficiently scalable (to counteract reduced visibility and overall contrast)
- Why the difference in brightness between the (active) buttons in the Selected Items window and any other text on any window ? Or is that, again, an effect from the backgrounds ?

Very interesting post, except the conclusion, sadly.

Things (icons, corner brackets, ...) have already been changed since the first "release" on Singularity, so...

Sadly, they didn't remove the corner brackets...
They only made them thinner, which is better but still useless, distracting and aesthetically disgusting...

Since I've backed up my argument with what came up with my search, maybe you could return the favour CCP and show us the scientific paper that you apparently have access to that shows that it has been "scientifically proven" that colourless icons are easier to recognise?

A lot of the core HCI work that's been done was originally done in the '70s. This is one field where the age of the work doesn't necessarily invalidate it. Actually that's true in general. Remember that humans haven't changed much so a human's ability to distinguish between shapes and how color influences that would not have changed since the '70s. Our eyes and brains haven't changed since then, why should the result have?

New HCI material that covers interactions that weren't possible in the '70s would be valid and there wasn't a lot on virtual reality then. Also touch screens weren't as refined, but the core concept is there. Ubiquity of touch screens gives us a lot more data than we used to have so some conclusions have changed, but all the core work has been done.

The Mac usability guidelines that Apple still uses today are almost unchanged from when Jeff Raskin originally wrote them back in the '70's and '80s.

And all that said, iconography predates all of that. So, no, your older studies are still valid.

ATM, NeoCom ship fitting icon looks like a Rifter.

I think the ship fitting icon should be generic, representing all ships - try something like the triangle-shaped ship used for the ISIS window (not the ISIS neocom icon, but the icon shown in upper left when ISIS is active) OR the abstract triangle icons used to represent ship sizes in ISIS. (The icon representing Battlecruisers would be perfect.)