There is the Inventory, the Ship Hangar and the Item Hangar. They are 3 distinct windows with different features. If you don’t see a title of the window, you might drop a ship onto a window and wonder why it disappeared. Turns out, you dropped it on the item hangar and it landed in the ship hangar. Window titles also tell you things like Ship Maintenance Bay, which looks exactly like the Ship Hangar, and they tell Cargo Hold apart from Fleet Hangar (which can hold ships and modules and ammo all in one).
That new players won’t find the term “Directional Scanner” helpful is far from reality. If they see the term “directional scanner” they have a clear name in front of them for the window and can search more information about it. Without the name, they just have a window that doesn’t tell them anything about the to be expected functionality.
Window headers/titles serve an important role in many windows.
Well, the weird devision in “Active Ship” and “Inventory” (which is basically the same but inventory gives more options like other hangars, POS modules) always confused me. You know that you are in the fleet hangar, because there is this tree-view. (which is hideable if you want to use it for a compact view for cap booster reload for example)
I also found that some people were actually using the Hangars Button in the Station UI. This should be removed completely, because the Inventory (ALT-C) is way more easy to navigate in my opinion and having multiple ways to select ships and items is weird. I never used this button in 10 years of Eve.
The directional scanner has a “Scan” button, which is a good giveaway that it’s a window to Scan something. If somehow the design could get the “directional” part in that design, it would be clear that it’s the directional scanner. The easiest example would be to replace “Scan” button with “Directional Scan” button, but that name is very long but there are other ways a good UI/UX Designer mind find
Maybe you haven’t used that button, but that is how I have always accessed my ships in stations. Much easier to have your ship hangar open up by default when docking than to use the inventory list for it, in my opinion.
Now I can use the inventory list in compact mode to move items around, while also having quick access to each of my ships by icon. I wouldn’t have that if we had to use the inventory window for everything.
Swapping ships this way takes just one doubleclick after docking.
Give it a try, or let it be. No need to ask removal of useful features that you personally don’t use.
Yeah, this depends on the playstyle I guess. I always use the Agent or Guests window.
My Inventory is always open by default when docking so I just need to click on Ship Hangar and can switch. It’s of course 1 more click but it fits better for my stuff, because I want to interact with those Agents mostly.
I have other mostly pvp players seen using that Hangar thingy to switch ships like you explained, but that’s an option I would never prefer, because I always needed that 1 click to find my distribution missions and this is the only good way to talk to Agents. I just feel removing it would be more consistent, not necassarily better for every playstyle.
There are a lot of people here now with screenshots an stuff, so I’ll just say this:
The UI looks okay. It’s different but I’d get used to it. Personally I’m not a fan of flat UI’s but I’d live with one.
It can’t, however, come at a cost of functionality, so if fancy white space is interfering with stuff like dscan or fleet window, the functionality must absolutely take precedence.
That is one of the main things that come with this new UI → giant window titles, and I don’t think titles are necassary or important at all. Nothing related to shortcuts, but having a large amount of space for a title that does not really matter is wasteful.
It’s just an idea. Of course the title right now has some options like the window options, but the idea of having a title to explain what a window is would be unnecassary if the window explained that with it’s design.
Yes, maybe I took that idea too far, I was just wondering where this statement may come from. As I never had any uncertainty which cargo or hangar I am looking at.
Window titles also tell you things like Ship Maintenance Bay, which looks exactly like the Ship Hangar, and they tell Cargo Hold apart from Fleet Hangar (which can hold ships and modules and ammo all in one).
I guess the point is, there are many different playstyles and they all must be served well. In that case I can see my idea of removing the Hangar Station button is bad, but it feels weird that you can do the same task in many ways. Like opening the Market from the left neocom taskbar or the station ui which is on the right side of the window usually ? why?
This redundancy is in a lot of places in EVE and not necessarily bad.
Multiple ways to warp to a bookmark, multiple ways to create a fleet, at least four different ways to tell your ship to orbit a target (radial menu, rightclick, keybind, target window) and many more redundant options.
Having more specialized UI elements you can anchor on screen fitting your playstyle
What happens physically, if you want to look at the broadcast history?
Your eyes wander down to where this window is anchored, then they focus on “Fleet (1 Member)” first. You wonder why you don’t have more friends. The highlight under History let’s you know you are in the right tab, then it might wander to the large “Clear History” Button, after deciding not to click that, you can finally get your repairs onto a ship.
With a more minimal design you may look at your window that you can find with this great upper edge contrast line and start repairing immediatly.
sure, those tabs are important and should not miss. But the idea is to give people what they want. In this case a small history window to shoot/repair broadcasted targets.
They don’t need to know how many members the fleet has, or that there are other tabs, those are very unnecassary for the task.
See how easy your eyes find what to do with the old design. You immediatly start clicking on a green or red thing. If you want, you can still have all other information, but the new design just distracts the eyes and will lead to slower response times, because the design distracts from the main goal of this window.
I never used that button because I think that 2 separate windows for Item Hangar and Ship Hangar beat the Inventory or the Hangar view in the station panel by miles. With 2 windows, there is no annoying scrolling up and down to find the hangars, there is no annoying clutter from all the ships or station containers making the scrolling even more tedious, and the window and tree view takes away so much screen space compared to dedicated windows.
I don’t understand why anyone would ever use the Inventory for anything because it’s inferior for everything but the few aspects that are only accessible through it.
You don’t if you are actually interested in conserving screen realestate and have your myriad of hangars stacked into one window.
This is my window setup in space. The small window in the bottom right holds all ship holds that I ever need to access in a tiny, convenient place. If I had to use the Inventory for anything, I’d had to use so much more screen space and would still be worse off because of all the annoying scrolling, auto-scrolling and narrow rows for the different list items.
No, I don’t see any smoothness in that approach. In your choice, how would I even get from Broadcast history to the Fleet Members list? By having several specialized fleet windows (Fleet list, broadcasts, adverts) that I all stack into 1 window stack to then basically have the same as before? Or do you want the window to auto-hide the tab row until I hover over it? Have fun using that in a fleet fight. I hope you see how ridiculous that really is.
This information is not unnecessary for the task and it’s always valuable information to know for a variety of scenarios, like when the FC divides the fleet into specific squads which should only hold a specific number of pilots.
It’s also not unnecessary to know that there are other tabs because it’s irrelevant information for the task. Your attempt at creating more clutter on screen with more dedicated windows creates real distraction from the task, though, because every information window is potentially in a different place which requires even more eye and mouse movement, or it requires people to put all the windows back into one stack and pretty much waste time of their life on something that should have never been a thing.
Obviously, it goes without saying that the current new design with the huge titles is utter garbage. It boggles my mind how anyone could ever think that this was a good idea. I would really like to know who in CCP came up with the idea that bigger titles would improve the UI experience at all.
I’m not sure this works for my production. It’s way easier to navigate all those hangars with the Inventory. in the same amount of screenspace. Especially selecting a bunch minerals and construction components and getting them into an other hangar. If you have like 200 Blueprint Copies lying around you’d scroll yourself to death with the regular thing. For mining and other activities it makes sense to split them up into new windows like fleet hangar and ore hold.
Edit: just another thing where different playstyles have different needs. My opinion to get rid off it just because I don’t use it was stupid. But using the Inventory has some other advantages… what if you are looting multiple containers after a citadel blows up… You can keep track of the containers in your tree-view thingy as well
Visual style of UI good, but bad that size of basic elements i.e window title bar and progress bar of cargo fullness is larger than before. The sizes must stay the same as now. Also would be nice more contrast to the window title bar.
