Despite earlier feedback about it, information density is still 10 to 30% lower in every window.
I already wish I had more than 29 lines on my overview, there is no way i’ll adopt a new UI with only 21, wake up CCP.
1 Like
If you can’t give us at least the same information density in photon as there is in the classic UI, if not better, what’s the point? This isn’t a game about shiny explosions, it’s a game about managing information streams and part of that is making sure that the information is visible.
The last thing I want is for this game to go down the path of WoW or EQ where third party tools have become mandatory in order to be able to get the information you need to successfully play the game, but reducing the amount of information available to players on one screen for some shiny beveled corners and (honestly excessively) wider margins is exactly what that will cause.
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Agreed, the skill training window is so bad now that I have to use evemon to add or re-organize skills. It’s possible the most glaring example of how photon prioritized shiny “modern” UI over functional UI.
- Please reduce the padding, space is a premium in this game!
- Standing Icon in chat is off centre, and not as nice as previous
- Update the link to the feedback forum topic! It’s 2 threads out of date! Had to go hunting to post here.
FFS why did you apply it automaticaly??? Big buttons is ok maybe for 4k but for fullHD - IT IS CANCER
CeCePe is as well as usual…
All the worst,
your angry customer!
2 Likes
You can opt out. Calm down.
TL;DR: Opted Out Because Of Eye Strain – and there is a massive accessibility issue with the unchangeable “pure” black background
Note: many drones were harmed in the course of this review
I gave it a sincere try today running a DED 6/10. I had to opt out early for a few reasons, listed in order of importance:
- Eye strain. The contrast, color, or something along those lines physically hurts my eyes. I even changed the theming, which helped only a little. The main culprit are the excessive reliance upon subtle shades of white and grey everywhere in combination with pure black background, which I couldn’t fix with theming nor colorblind mode. The main problem is I have to distinguish them from each other, not the black background, to understand the conveyed information. This strains my eyes severely.
- Brightness. This kind of ties into the “eye strain” but deserves its own mention. Certain panes feel like they are “super bright”, while others overall feel shadowed and in the background. It is inconsistent pane to pane and overall makes it hard for my brain to ignore un-important yet brighter information than more-important but overall dimmer information.
- “Compact Mode”. Sincere feedback: “Compact Mode” should be The Normal Mode, and the “current normal Photon UI” should instead be the alternative mode: the one you have to manually opt-in to pane-by-pane – call it “Puff Mode”. Once I figured out where to find “compact mode”, you bet I enabled it in every pane I could find. The whitespacing is horrendous otherwise.
There are elements to the UI I do really like. I wish I could slog through and try to use it, but I am not willing to physically subject myself to eye strain to get the cooler and seamless UI.
Detailed feedback follows. The last item (E) is the major accessibility issue.
A) The Drone Window
Eye Strain: 
Brightness:
Compact Mode:
This alone is the top offender for me in multiple categories. Count the varying number of greys alone in this screenshot of the inactive window:
Between the title text, “Drones In Bay” text, “Drones In Bay” background, glow around the down arrow, drone name text, HP bar, icons, and the background of the pane it feels like there is indeed about 6 different shades of white, grey, and black.
Those HP bars are easily the brightest thing in the entire UI when you have up Overview, Locations, Local, Fleet, Signatures, Selected Item, Cargo, and Drone windows. It alone is the source of so much eye strain trying to ignore it. I keep it close to my modules because I manage drones like I manage my modules. It lets me win 1v1s that rely on drone micromanagement. I’m not moving the window.
The functionality is also awful, even when compact mode is enabled. For one, I could no longer fit the same information – hint: see if you can find the scrollbar, and count that as yet another eye-straining shade of grey:
I also do not need pictures of my drones to know what they are. The picture, and the vertical spacing that goes with it, needs to go away even in Compact Mode. When you enable compact mode, the pictures still stick around for launched drones, which remains a problem.
There is also weird or buggy behavior where “Drones In Space” seems to be anchored to the bottom of the pane unless “Drones In Bay” is collapsed, then it’s listed right below “Drones In Bay”. Do one, or the other, but don’t have it jump around.
B) Selected Item Window
Eye Strain:
Brightness: 
Compact Mode: 
Quite simply, the icons rely on shades of grey to determine whether an option is enabled or disabled. There are 4 kinds of apparent grey to a human eye:
- The “Selected Item” title
- The text of the selected item
- The icons in “enabled” state
- The icons in “disabled” state
This single fact makes it incredibly arduous on my eyes: The Selected Item title shade of grey is in-between “enabled” and “disabled” state of greys. My eyes strain trying to ignore this middle-shade to reflexively distinguish the others.
As to why compact mode needs to be the default, check this out, I selected an NPC:
Now tell me, what is its bounty? Do you think there’s enough space to display what that bounty is? The answer is “IDK” and “no” because the true answer is that theres a tiny scrollbar to display a hidden second line of text to tell me its bounty is something like 14,000 ISK. Yes, that’s a tiny scrollbar below the “-” sign.
Yes – that “Centus Special Unit - 12km” line of text is 1 of 2, the second line is just hidden below! This entirely goes away with “compact mode”
The picture is also critical. Why is the picture only a part of “compact mode”? Shouldn’t the big-ass picture be a part of “not-compact mode” too?
Are you really going to read the three physical inches of screen space that is the line “True Creation’s Park Overseer Wreck” to determine “yes, that’s a wreck, not what I wanted to shoot” instead of just immediately having a picture convey that information?
You don’t have to go hunting for the last word “wreck” there. The picture in invaluable at conveying information. This is especially important because what you have selected for modules (via targeting reticle) versus what you’ve selected with your mouse (this pane) is at times a source of confusion, especially for newbies.
Compact mode should absolutely be the default if only for the picture.
B.5) General Window Headers
I wanted to briefly mention for inconsistent functionality. Can you tell me which one of these windows is locked in position?
That’s right, both of them are locked in position! The lock icon is inconsistently displayed in the headers of windows. The difference seems arbitrary. For example, the Locations Window doesn’t have the lock icon, but your ship’s cargo window does.
Makes no sense.
C) Probe Window
Eye Strain:
Brightness:
Compact Mode:
Compact mode doesn’t erase the sins of this window.
The eye strain is significant, as you have clashing shades of grey to try to subtly discern to understand what is going on in this very busy pane. Take for example this simple footer:
The greyed-out probe launcher icon, “reconnect” icon, “recall” icon, 3 “launch in formation” icons, “center on my ship” icon, and the word “launch” all are crazy noisy and busy. Additionally, the default blue highlight on the button really feels too close to these greys, which just compounds to the eye-strain problem. Especially because right above this pane are more colors and more greys conveying what can and can’t be warped to, whether it is hovered or not, etc.
D) Any Chat Window that displays standings
Eye Strain:
Brightness:
Compact Mode:
Quite simply, “Excellent Standing” is incredibly straining on the eyes to see on a black background.
I just went back to my old settings to check, because I remember it being hard to see in my preferred theme as well. And yes, this was a problem with the old UI, but I had “solved” it by choosing a particular theme that melded the dark blue color with the background, so I didn’t have to notice the problem. The new UI absolutely requires a black background for some reason, contributing to contrast issues.
E) The Black Background
Eye Strain:
Accessibility:
The black background appears to be RGB(16, 16, 16) or #101010 based on loading up images into Krita. This is close enough to being “purely black background” and there’s good reasons no applications actually have “pure black” be their “dark mode”. And that reason is simple: users with OK eyesight experience halation. Beyond that, there is also an accessibility concern: users with astigmatism have it worse.
You can readily find “rates of astigmatism in adults” and “pure black background and halation” and such and figure out how it all ties together and why this is a big issue.
6 Likes
When you hover over a drone in the drone window an information window pops up: Good!
The information window does not include the speed of the drone: Bad.
Please add drone speed to the drone info pop up window.
You can still only consume one combat booster at a time as opposed to selecting multiple boosters and consuming all at once.
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Industry window:
Guys… your buttons are different in size. They are replacing each other, after player starts the job.
As you start many you see how buttons is “jumping”
this is quite unprofessional and can kill overall impression very quickly.
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There’s a lot to like but sadly a tonne to hate.
There’s a lot of good posts here that summerize “Less is More” and “This doesn’t acheive the goal of being cleaner”.
As a veteren player, over a decade, Proton UI has been the first that made me go looking into how to disable it. The first UI change to make me come to the forum to tell you I don’t like it.
I play at 1440p, at 90% scaling, and it still feels like half my screen is wasted space.
If the primary design point was to unify the UI between platforms, I get it, but please keep the legacy UI for PC users; otherwise this is the hill I, and all of my characters, die on.
2 Likes
I think you guys need to either hire some QA that know what they’re doing with UI, or listen to the ones you have. So many inconsistencies. Its like the development has been siloed and you all came together at the end of a few sprints with a box of stuff that you then tried to stitch together. Its a mess. I wouldn’t let a number of these things get out of the test environment… but you throw it at your paying customers… wow.
Fortunately, you seem to have some people in this thread that really don’t mind doing the QA role for you, seemingly for free… hopefully you will listen to them. Sure there may be some positives to changes you have made, but the cons outweigh these and I found myself turning the UI off and hoping that it dies in a fire somewhere. Please don’t force this on people without addressing the issues… especially the accessibility themed issues that will introduce unnecessary eye strain. You have a lot of changes that go against how people play this game… information is key and now its hidden in silly scroll menus or wont fit in previous windows because you have added padding… for no apparent reason. Why so many different shades of grey? Why are some buttons that could be argued as important now faded out, whilst other information is being highlighted for no apparent reason. You now have some buttons that are so large they impair the functionality of the window unless the user resizes it, but in doing so, it ends up taking much more space than is needed.
It feels like you have tried to make things friendly for mobile devices by sacrificing the people playing on desktops and laptops… interesting.
Please either hire some QA with specialities in this area, or let them out of the dungeon and listen to them if you already have them.
3 Likes
The “new PHOTON UI” is TERRIBLE! Ironically, though everything became bigger and taking up screen real estate, the station icons were WAY TOO SMALL. I searched all options but couldn’t find a solution - except to TURN OFF PHOTON UI and restart my client.
Please leave this as a turn off-able option.
2 Likes
Hi,
Not impressed, I was in a wormhole when i logged in with new UI engaged, at first it looked nice. And then i started using it.
Drones were not reacting fast enough against sleepers, as the buttons were ironically too 3d and not working when clicked. To see enough o fspace with all the windows open (Inventory, overview, asstes/scanners, chat and drones), keep inventory and drones as small as possible, which became problematic with the large 3d looking text and icons.
soon became unmanageable and drones were attacking wrong targets and i was scrambled and webbed, which is normal and easy to fix by targeting and killing the frigates that do this, only drones weren’t responding with the new toggle, so i tried to right click menu which also wasn’t responding due to the minimal landscape available due to text size, and due to the timing, i died.
Not impressed, this game requires fast response and actions in combat, the new UI does not facilitate this.
Text is too big in titles and tabs obscuring important
2 Likes
Everything looks flat, green, and overlapping. Half the buttons are greyed out. Overview looks unfamiliar. Restoring my GUI was an unexpected disruption. I don’t understand why anyone would try to mess with my GUI.
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Very strong contrast((Eyes get tired of the contrast! The idea is gorgeous! But why doesn’t anyone think that Eve is played for more than 30 minutes a day? Developers, I want to see your concern for us! And this is a mockery for the eyes! You can remove this black color?Or to give the opportunity to choose a color?
Lack of the close button in compact mode seems completely unintuitive - it is supposed to be the clean, easier to use mode, so why are those buttons disappearing? I thought the mode was supposed to help with ease of access, so also limit the number of clicks it takes to do a thing, not increase it.
Other than that, I also agree - the new compact mode is pretty good. It’s just that it sometimes takes away a little too much from the windows (like the inventory window becoming completely barren without the numbers showing you exactly how much inventory space you still have or est. value).
2 Likes
Yep - I very much agree with this post. Lack of a dedicated close button is very unproductive. Having to open a menu just to close a window is … off-putting. In general, Photon UI is good, but taking away those buttons hurts. And removing those buttons isn’t doing much to clean up the display - the windows still have a title bar region which takes up space, so why not put the most over-used menu items in there as a dedicated button to avoid the right-clicking? e.g. the “Stack All” function in the inventory window.
3 Likes
I legit cant read the market because its too see though and i cant find away to adjust it
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Just tell me where the opt out is at. This is awful. I wasted 5-6 hours trying to like it.
edit - nvmd, found it in settings finally. Yay! Hopefully it’s gone forever. Not funny making us click the darn thing on every character individually though. Grrrrrr CCP
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Open the settings menu (ie press Esc). Find the “Feature Preview” tab, disable Photon. You will then need to close the client then log back in. You will also find that the Neocom bar is probably much bigger than you usually have it, so that will need to be adjusted.
All in all, a fine waste of your time and patience.
3 Likes