Suggestion: Add key listeners to the anomaly scanner in order to perform actions with the keyboard
Keywords: ui, scanner, anomalies, signatures
Note: Useful to quickly process anomalies and signatures
Before I start to rat, I always ignore the anomalies I do not intend to run. I do this by opening up the anomaly scanner, selecting all the applicable sites and ignoring them in chunks via select -> right click -> ignore, but this is tedious because simply pressing Del on my keyboard would save me from going through the menue and possibly ignoring the only sanctum in system 
There surely could be other keys used for other actions, but this is currently what I got on the top of my head.
1 Like
Sounds like a lot of work to save one single click.
Yeah, intentionally though, so a discussion on its own can evolve. Hence the “Suggestion | Little Thing”.
If you ever got into programming and worked with GUI stuff, it isn’t. Let’s say that every window in EvE is a “frame” and every instance of a “frame” is capable of reacting to keyboard input.
One just has to tell the frame to accept input and then what to do.
The frame then “listens” for input and does the stuff u told it to do.
You have to understand something about “removing tediousness”.
- Everything can be tedious, when all it takes is a lazy human declaring something tedious.
- Removing tedium does not help in the long run, because there will come someone else who will declare that it is not enough.
- There is no clear line drawable between “tediousness” and “interesting complexity”. (Not saying this applies to your case). Lazy and simpler minds will perceive interesting complexity as “tediousness”, because they fail to grasp the interesting aspects.
If you have any better reasons than “effort”, then I recommend you use those instead.
The last person who complained about things being tedious considered that paying attention to his surroundings in space is tedious, and how he should not be forced to act self responsibly in an hostile environment.
It is the equivalent of asking for safety for the king in a game of chess, because it is too tedious to keep him from getting checkmated.
1 Like
Okay, let’s get this to the point:
The UI in EvE consits mostly of lists and listed context menues. It’s hard to navigate through them because there are no visual indicators besides text, this however has changed recently, but only slightly (see eject/self destruct entries when right-clicking on your ship in space).
- With clumsy menues, there comes both a learning requirement, since you need to get used to where things are located in the menues (“I know where X is located”) and an opposing chance of successfully executing a certain task when under pressure.
- The more the menues are used, the faster you can execute sth and the less you are likely to screw things up (learning process).
When designing a UI, the designer is asked to make it accessible and intuitive, meaning that a user can do what they want without having to read through a manual or using the help function, but EvE lacks especially the accessibility part.
A way to measure accessibility is by counting the different steps a user has to take in order to execute the action they want to perform. Transferring this over to our current case, we’re having the current path:
- select items in anom list
- right klick
- (search for option)
- klick option
vs the desired path:
- select items
- press key
So, taking this into account, we’re facing an increse in accessibility of minimum 25 and up to 50%, with the latter being most likely the average case.
One could argue that people would need to know that “Del” is commonly used for removing things, but we suppose the user to be familiar with common key-combinations and their associated actions, since this is shared between a humongous amount of applications.
So, let’s consider the complexity aspect and first have a look at what complexity and what complicity respectively is.
Complex tasks are highly dynamic in nature and can be described as “This situation has too many outcomes so knowing exactly and precisely all the paths is not efficient”. Instead of knowing a lot about the things required to work, the actor has to have the ability to do work on something. Let’s make an example here:
Managing logistics in EvE is very complicated because it requires you to know when and where you have to deliver something. It’s is not very complex, though, because you only need to be able to use your jump freighter, which consists of:
- jump
- dock
- refuel
- watch local
Ratting in a carrier, however, is very complex because it requires you to be able to
- properly utilize your keyboard and manage your fighters
- always keep track of your capacitor and NSA
- make sure that you are aligned out
- (be able to recognize the last wave of a site)
- dscan and align to the next site whilst still managing your fighters, as in** multitasking**
- (constantly close the Near 3 window when it pops up because ur under a super umbrella)
and the named tasks cannot simply be described as “no red in local” or “drag and drop fuel from station- to fuel-hangar of ship”.
So, this roughly boils down to
- complexity: I need to have skills to do sth
- complicity: I need to know sth to do sth
Changing the UI would reduce the amount of knowledge needed and thus affect the complicity, but not the complexity.
From this it follows that by increasing the accessbility, the game effectively gets easier because one doesn’t need to know as much as before, but not to a notable extend because the gameplay mechanics make EvE hard and not the UI on its own. Knowing which buttons to press so you can evade unwanted buttsecks is the smaller issue when compared to “how do I keep track of neuts in my area”.
Of course, the UI is one of the reasons why EvE has a steep learning curve, but even if you considered it to be a detrimental part of its complicity: Shouldn’t “real” gameplay elements rather do that for you?
Continuing with your 2nd point, there is a limit to this because the simplest way to do something is placing either a button on the UI or implementing a global key which can be pressed in order to execute the desired action.
In UI design, however, you also have something called User Experience. User Experience, or UX, describes the general feeling of a UI and its compounds such as accessibility, intuitive design and visual appearance.
The more buttons you place on a frame, however, the more “cluttered” it becomes and thus the UX suffers because the visual appearance is being restricted by the clutteing. This means that there indeed is a limit to how far you can take it since the cluttered UI is also perceived as unpleasant or “tedious”.
You could argue that one would only need to place one button which were used to turn the game on and off because it played itself, but then again: Are you playing EvE because you want a bot to play for you or because you want to play it yourself?
Shortening the path to do sth is of course partially automating things, but I want to point out that in this case it is only a infinitesimally small change.
Coming back to the meta level, one could expand this further and ask for a complete revamp, however is this particular suggestion not a revamp because the frames in EvE are already capable of receiving input from the keyboard (in CCP words: They have the technology) and it would supposingly only execute a function which is already present, meaning that it would most likely not even require to write an algorith.
In conclusion, this means that the
- cost
- complexity
aspects, which are oftenly used to counter a suggestion, remain untouched by changing the UI as suggested.
Yes it took me 2 hours to write this down.
Edit: Formatting
1 Like
What an amazing post! This guy uses his brain!
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.