Final (for now) feedback on the current state of photon.
First off, the GOOD way to fix photon UI:
Roll it all the way back to the design brief. Start over. This time, when your design brief says something in clear unambiguous language like “more consistent window style and layout” don’t find a way to handle that aspect even worse than the old UI. Actually do the thing your new UI is explicitly meant to be doing to improve things. You shouldn’t need a “compact mode” option for users to enable to get basic functionality out of their UI. It should just work properly, at least as well as the old UI does, for the things which it’s important for the UI to be able to do. Simple things, for example, like actually having proper visibility on inventory space and the items in it. Hiding functional elements of the window to make the poor design of other elements less negatively impactful isn’t how you fix the fact that your new UI is objectively worse than the old one at a really important part of gameplay. It’s how you escalate the problem by adding new ways for it to be worse than the old one without fixing the problem. Starting over would let you avoid the screwup that made you think breaking it worse was a good idea.
But since that’s obviously not going to happen, a breakdown of the current state of photon:
One big complaint about photon in its previous iteration was that compact mode was removing necessary functionality. An example present for every single compact mode window was the absence of close and minimise buttons. This one part of this feedback has been addressed. That’s a tiny little baby step in the right direction. It’s nowhere near enough of this problem addressed to warrant pushing the photon UI live again in its current state. It wasn’t ready to go live again, even just based on this problem, which you’ve only addressed the most basic of surface level elements of. The inventory screen still hides important information when you switch it to compact mode. Only when you’re using a fairly small inventory window does the hiding of this information actually make a meaningful difference to the amount of information you can see in photon compared with the old UI. It hides necessary information without removing any of the wasted space in the non-hidden parts of the window. Similarly, the drone window actively wastes more space and has an objectively worse layout than the old UI by default, and compact mode removes functional elements of the window without fixing most of the problems which are actually wasting all the space and causing it to be harder to use. Bring back the old layout and spacing for these windows and others, and you won’t need to add compact mode to fix a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
As mentioned in my explanation for why the current iteration of photon should just be scrapped and the UI design started over, I mentioned that there was a stated goal of a more consistent UI design. Photon doesn’t even come remotely close to providing consistency. The old UI isn’t very consistent in its window design, but it’s a LOT closer to it than photon is. being consistent with the style of UI elements is a good thing. Your design brief makes it clear you know that, so ACTUALLY BE CONSISTENT WITH YOUR UI DESIGN instead of doing what photon is doing. When you’re not just failing at a stated goal to improve the UI, but failing so hard you’re making that aspect of the UI worse than the already not very good state of the current UI, that’s a sign that you’re trying way too hard to make things look different instead of caring about keeping what works.
On the topic of keeping what works, the old UI has dividing lines between columns in every window where such an interface element makes sense. This makes those elements of the UI much easier to read and avoids a lot of problems. Removing those lines serves no purpose, impairs readability of the information shown, and can be harmful in some cases. If you really think this objectively stupid choice is something to be proud of, you can add it as an option (bring back the objectively better old UI’s use of this element as the default) which users can enable if they want to compromise their game’s functionality or think causing physical pain to their friends is funny.
Wasted space in the UI is still a problem. Of particular note, even though you’ve added window margin size to the settings screen, this doesn’t actually fix the problem of window margins being obnoxiously large. The header text is still too large, so even if the “compact” option was actually as compact as the old UI’s margins, you’d be wasting more space for no benefit. And the “compact” setting is still too much wasted space in the margins, in addition to not fixing any of the wasted space between lines and between items in grid view UI elements like the inventory window.
Making the currently-active window more distinctively indentifiable is a good step in the right direction, but the way this has been done in photon comes with more problems than it solves. Making all inactive UI elements a flat single colour means it’s harder to judge which tab is active in any window with multiple tabs. This is less problematic in windows where the different tabs have such different appearance from one another than it’s easy to see at a glance without the UI making it obvious, but there are some windows where this isn’t the case. Most noteworthy is a window around which significant amounts of the core game experience is built: the chat window. Not being able to tell which chat channel is visible when it’s not the current active window is a massive design flaw. This is similar in its degree of stupidity to the removal of the close button from windows in compact mode. Mistakes of this scale should never have even been considered as a possibility because of how obviously stupid they are on their face. Screwing up this way is a sign that whoever’s designing your UI hasn’t been taught the most basic of UI design principles. If they’ve never taken a beginner UI design course, you should probably have them do that. If they did take one, you should probably have them explain to their teacher that the lesson they got was less useful an education on UI design than if they hired a Korean fisherman to translate a Sanskrit manuscript into English without knowing a single word in either language, get their money back, then take an actual beginner course in UI design so they’ll come out of it knowing better than to subject your customers to something like the photon UI again.
Also related to the chat window, if you get a message in a chat channel, and that channel isn’t the active tab or if it’s the active tab for the window but the chat window isn’t the active window, the channel header flashes to show that you have a new message. No matter what, this always happens in the properly-functional UI. With photon, if your cursor happens to be hovering over the channel header at the time the message is sent, it never flashes, and if you move your cursor across the header for the channel while it’s flashing, it stops, either preventing you from even having the possibility of seeing, or hiding the useful reminder that the channel has new information. This is just as stupid as the stupidest of other mistakes, but has the mitigating factor of being more plausible that it could have been done by mistake and overlooked, rather than chosen as an intentional design choice that makes the UI objectively worse because the person doing UI design shouldn’t be doing UI design.
So in summary, my opinion of photon has improved compared with the previous time it was forced onto users, but it’s still such a huge mess it seems like it would be more practical to scrap it and start over than to keep working with what you’ve got and try to fix it. You should probably consider doing that.
