Before:
After:
This is just the station menu, one client with the new and another client with the old, and eyeballed them up to approximately the same size (187x500 and 186x500)
The new UI feels smoother and nice and I think is probably a good improvement under the hood, but from a design perspective I’ll just sum it up with needs to be more compact or have more compact options.
Things that bother me right away:
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The wasted pixels: There is so much extra padding that it is not clear how to get rid of in the new UI that just in the station guests list alone you can only see ~75% of the names before having to scroll. The left and right padding are annoying too, I’m not trying to have my screen look like World of Warcraft, it frankly is busy enough and I need things to be compact, otherwise all I see is UI and not the actual game. Summary: The new UI wastes too much space, and needs a severely compacted mode (or a way to adjust this wasted space)
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The Icons. The gear Icon has been the settings icon for every window for nearly 2 decades, and now you decide to change it up as part of a UI architecture upgrade? The new Icon here is harder to see and does not yell ‘settings’. Even triple dots would have been a better choice, an icon that nearly every mobile and web app use to represent this kind of menu. I haven’t explored the rest of the icon changes, but right away there are some bad choices.
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The chat window: I like the new borders they look cleaner, but again they have way too much padding and wasted space on the sides. Why do I need text to start fading 20 pixels away from the edge of the window? The ‘compact’ status Icon is larger making the member list have to be widened to see the names. The tabs are larger so if you have many chat tabs now the names are harder to see without again widening the window. The chat tabs are taller and have a ton of padding too.
I did notice the chat window used the triple dots for the extra menu items, which from the comment above I think this was a good choice. Meanwhile the gear still appears for the chat window itself, but the newer UI again has a lot more wasted pixels.
A lot of the rest of it looks OK so far, but really the wasted pixels and bloated boarders are a deal breaker. I will be using the old UI as long as I can until this is addressed.
Summary: This isn’t the kind of UI updates I’m looking for as a nearly 2 decade player. If it makes the UI smoother and less resource consuming, then sure. I do like the lack of a bevel and clean lines of the new UI, but if the bevel goes away then so should the gap it created. UI updates I might like to see instead would be different HUD options, maybe even faction or ship specific. A Compact HUD, or other compact UI’s so I can have more things open at once. One of the harder things to get used to in Eve vs other games is managing all of the different windows (and tabs), and this UI upgrade just made that harder.