Doxs Roxs
White Wolves Defence league
The OSS
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Posted - 2006.12.18 11:48:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Apocryphai
Well, where to start?
First of all the right-click menu is cumbersome and unreliable. The menu should at the very least be sticky so that you don't repeatedly miss options 3-levels deep in the tree. This kind of nested-tree interface, especially with inconsistent directional placement of sub-trees (is it going to be on the left or the right? Who can tell!?) has long been recognised as inefficient and error-prone.
Secondly, the placement of options within the sub-tree menus is illogical and uncustomisable. How many times have you initiated a convo when you meant to show info? That's just one example. Oh and there's no state-specific coding, i.e. greying-out of non-applipcable options. This means that the menu ordering is incosistent since instead of greying out the non-applicable options simply disappear so that the menu is different every time you open it. Poor design, long, long, LONG ago modified in decent interface design circles.
Thirdly, far too much of the UI is fixed and un-customisable. You point out a very important fact about interface use - everyone is different. You have got used to the current interface, and that's great, but every single user has different preferences and different ways of working. Any UI that fails to allow for these personal differences will, by definition, be less than optimal for many of it's users. If you want a good example of a UI that allows for superb customisation then look at the WoW interface - say what you like about the game, the UI is a masterpiece of design, openness and flexibility.
Lots of people have got used to it, that doesn't make it good 
The user interface in this game should not even be called an interface, just have a look at any of the other modern MMOs on the market and you will find EvEs interface to be embarrisingly old and hard to use.
Its bad enough that one cannot customize it properly, the sub menus add insult to injury.
Ill list a few things that I feel can be improved alot, its not all, but a preview
A proper quickbar is missing
And Im not talking about the crap we have today for weapons and modules, Im talking about a customizable quickbar where you can drag your own buttons for different commands. In most other modern interfaces you simply drag the button from the normal interface window and drop it on your quickbar. I played Dark Age of Camelot before EvE, and there they eventually expanded the quickbars to 3 onscreen at any given time. And each quickbar was scrollable (via keybindings) for a total of 300 interface shortcuts, with 30 visible in screen at any time. This could be used in Eve to control drones and all other aspects of the ship etc.
I cannot move or customize the ships status window.
This one is really basic, I want to move the status window or I might even want to change its size and shape. But we cannot, were stuck with a status window in the middle of the screen. In more developed interfaces (have a look at WoW for a prime example, but DAOC was almost the same with an XML based UI) there were thousands of custom status windows available from the player base since the UI is so easily customizable. Most revolved around cutting away the crap and displaying the really important information. This also meant that you could position your HP bars like any other window, and you could move them where ever you want them, have different parts transparent etc.
Keyboard shortcuts
At the moment only the F1-F12 keys are really free for use since all other keys more or less default to the chatbox. One simple solution that was used in DAOC was to have all keys available for binding to quickbars or other interface controls. To chat you would have to press enter first. Thus the default behaivour is to access your shortcuts and interface, and the secondary is to chat. Of course, in a proper UI the user should be able to choose what key to use for chat activation
Regards
/Doxs
After 9 months, why is my face just a '!' ? |