Using that list is prone to errors like nothing else. Released the mouse a moment too early and materials or BP land in the wrong container. Have fun finding them again. Or if you got too close to the edges, the list starts scrolling on its own. That’s not easy to use or convenient. It’s a constant struggle to never make a single mistake.
With your list, individual pixels matter a ton because the boundary between each list item is very narrow in the current design. The new UI in its current form will “improve” this massive tedium risk factor by padding the boundaries but that will make the list itself much longer and require more scrolling. Stacked windows are not impacted by that.
With the regular windows, I use the search to find exactly what I need. Little to no scrolling required unless, for instance, if I want to move dozens of BPC from the storage container into the project container. That moving of BPC works easier in dedicated windows in a stack as I can drag and drop them on the window tab that doesn’t move, doesn’t collapse, doesn’t autoscroll - it’s just there where it supposed to be.
On grid containers that are not yours appear in the Inventory tree list? Didn’t know but if that is the case, please explain to me how a list with 100s of entries is easy to navigate? Besides: You keep track of those containers easier in a window stack if you do it that way. You can open one container after another on the field and stack them into 1 window and you know exactly which ones are empty and which aren’t.
Not to mention that Tagging them so that everyone on grid knows which containers have been checked is a much better way to keep track of looted containers than with the inventory. Everyone sees tags in space/in the loot overview tab on the containers and can sort the overview tab by tags or simply ignore the containers and/or mark them as opened.
Like the consistency and color coding, but it would be better if players can adjust margin and scaling unless CCP buys me a big new display.
Other MMOs rarely scale their UI up; they sometimes scale down instead because the information they handle is getting more as the game mechanics bloat. EVE players are already dealing with data sheets due to the game’s complexity.
I agree that dense old UI scares new players of the new decade. Photon’s current design shines with summarized game data. Given the simplified info, this fits quite well to new players.
However, with margins/padding getting bigger and still a large amount of information to handle, new UI windows easily overlap themselves and hinder swift reaction. We may have to use more third-party parsers to make info more organized, like what we’re doing with d-scan results. This clumsiness and inconvenience also affect new player impressions.
To make Photon more favorable two options should be given to players: big, easily recognizable, intuitive UI with simplified/summarized info; or dense, space-efficient UI with detailed info.
First of all, are there any plans to support more themes like we have them now on Tranquility? My theme is not ported and I kind of don’t like what’s offered atm. To my taste everything is too big, too much padding on buttons, big margins between elements, big focus line when you click on something but most of all color. Would it be too much to add a custom slot and have player input colors they would like in hex and maybe font size and padding/margins? Why not do it properly and make it customizable
Does this mean we can get the old skill UI back? The new one is absolute asscancer to deal with when you’re multiboxing and trying to get all your alts on the same page.
How about the old, colorful Neocom icons? And can we get the current incursion LP pool back in the wallet or journal rather than the Agency?
Additionally, when are you going to unify the un-removeable icons on the bottom of the Neocom? They don’t have a particular order they seem to stay in and it’s annoying when you’re going by muscle memory to try to redeem daily rewards when you open the stupid Agency UI.
Oh almost forgot. If we’re in, say, wormhole space, we still should be able to browse the entirety of the agency, even the ones listed as “unavailable due to current location”, in case we’re discussing rolling the current K-space chain for a new one, to see if it’s worth popping out in that space for some content.
As for the Photon UI… way, way too much bloat. Too much information is lost because of the colossal headers and increased font sizes.
The amount of space wasted in pretty much every window is horrible. There is a roughly 1cm border around most windows for my screen. I already struggle with screenspace, this is just silly.
See for yourself the comparison where the nothing-edge starts in the new UI
-Probe window
-Dscan
-Chat
-Saved Locations
Even the “Save bookmark” window, which I forgot to show in the second picture, has an absolutely unnecessary border.
The nothing-border serves no purpose whatsoever
Hey folks, my name is CCP Junison and I’m a lead UI designer here at CCP, and part of the team that is leading the work on Photon UI.
First of all, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to look at the Photon UI and giving your feedback on it. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
We decided to create the Beta opt-in feature so we could show you projects like the Photon UI in the early stages and get your feedback earlier in the development than usual so we can act on it. Photon is very much in active development and a WIP and we look forward to continuing working on it and showing you the improvements along the way.
The primary reason why we set out on doing this project was to improve consistency within our UI and reduce cognitive load. Inconsistencies within the current UI are impacting all players and especially confusing new players. So it is important for us to create a strong foundation for our UI and out of that foundation create a design system that ensures a coherent, modern and satisfying experience for our players.
We can see and understand your points regarding the spacing and sizing of elements. Based on cognitive science and player research consisting of interviews with various types of players there are valid arguments for increasing the sizing and spacing. On a basic level: The information density, small line-height, and little breathing space between elements is making it hard to digest the information at hand and causes confusion. Once again, particularly for newer players.
At the same time we understand that it’s important for players, especially veteran players to have as much information as possible on-screen at any given time. We also need to take into account different screen resolutions and setups. So it’s a fine line that we have to tread and getting your feedback on this now is great. I just wanted to let you know that we see the feedback and we are working on ways to make the information more easily readable but at the same time allow for information density where needed.
Again, your feedback is super valuable and we appreciate you taking the time to let us know. We are listening and taking notes.
Thank you for the reply, I appreciate you taking time to respond to us.
I am sure you are aware of this, but I feel that the cognitive science explanation has to be taken with grain of salt. Yes, it is true, that on average everything else being equal UIs that are not cramped full of stuff and have clear labels introduce less cognitive load. However, it does not necessarily follow that by adding space and more / more visible labels you can reduce cognitive load. Why not? Because you might lose the “all else being equal” part.
Example: say a user needs to monitor a log of events as part of their work, and currently they can see say six latest things in a cramped window that’s kind of difficult to locate and read. You can reduce cognitive load by making the window have more space and adding a clear title that helps the user to locate and read the window. However, unless the user has room on their screen to increase the size of the window, the new more spacious elements now means they can only see three latest things on the log window. This means they either have to memorize more past events they still need to react to, or they need to scroll the window to check the past events - both adding to the cognitive workload, possibly adding more than your visual improvements just reduced.
This is what is going on e.g. with fleet broadcasts in these new plans.
(Letting each user customize the trade-off between visual clarity and information density for to suit their needs and information processing style is the optimal solution.)
What if you don’t try to do both at the same time in the form of a compromise that maybe won’t make either group happy, but allow players customisation choices between high information density or easy to digest newbie-friendly UI elements?
A toggle or slider between the two states could do that.
Thank you for this enlightening response. What does cognitive science say about lacking distinguishability of buttons from backgrounds, for instance? Or about visible buttons that take up improportionate amounts of space compared to the size of the rest of the window? What does it say about buttons being highlighted so that you can press enter but you don’t see which button is highlighted so you don’t know which button is activated upon pressing enter?
As for “lack of breathing space” between elements: Do you even take your cognitive science lessons to heart when you create the new Photon UI? See the new screenshot in Welcome to Photon UI - #188 by Kuku_Nosha as an example. The buttons in the Probe Scanner window are not visibly separated from the dynamic content space anymore. They sit right on the edge with 0 px space between both spaces. In contrast to that the old UI has actually visible separation elements between the spaces. Another example is the diminished distinguishability of active and inactive buttons in the above mentioned Probe Scanner window. In the old UI, inactive/unusable buttons are very dark but you still see them. In the new UI, they are much brighter and only a slight hue difference away from the colored active button. Do you think this really helps reduce confusion potential? And those are just examples from these 2 screenshots.
If you employ science to justify these changes, please at least do what the science says. You also don’t need 20px of empty space around the text in a button to make the button become more obvious. 3px added to the old UI buttons and a better color management for them achieves that as well, does not waste nearly as much space and would improve other lacking aspects of the UI as well.
When can we expect the next version of Photon UI that incorporates the suggested changes from this topic and other places?
They would still have to come up with a good default UI that doesn’t drive people insane or away. Have you seen how well they do that with the default Overview settings?
Default overview settings have a similar challenge of information density for players with different amounts of experience in the game. The default settings are meant for new players. Not a lot of tabs, not too many distinguishing colours, things like that.
Luckily the overview is fully customisable so that veteran players can make it match their playstyle no matter what kind of thing they like doing in the game. On top of that, the customised overview settings are easily sharable between players.
It would be great if we could have something similar for the UI where veteran players do not have to be stuck with newbie-friendly settings and have all the freedom to customise it to their tastes.
Thank you for responding and trying to explain. Interacting with players is a step in the right direction, compared to the silence that happens far too often from CCP’s side.
Would it not be possible to have 2 modes and the the players decide? Standard mode with bigger gaps and bigger elements - and Compact mode with has higher density as the name implies.
I have seen this type of option in quite a few other types of software, apps, and web services for many years already. It is very effective and lets people decide for themselves if they want more or less information visible.
And the current eve chat window already has 2 modes to illustrate how useful and do-able it is… the bigger one with portraits and a compact mode…
Inconsistencies started when CCP started to change the old UI
That sounds great, but please keep in mind, that for a lot of the content currently enjoyed by players that have many hours in the game, we not only prefer but need the information density, since we have multiple accounts in small resolutions (Like 1024x768).
Having a foundation is great, but please avoid the mistake of telling us “hey look guys at this great foundation we made!” and then spend the next couple years working on creating “a satisfying experience”.
Well i cant log into the game but from the what i have seen on the forum here
It’s going be another mobile/ tablet ui moving into a PC game which is totally crab.
I have round corners and light ul buttons. Is going to make everything so chaotic when you have multipule difffent windows open at the same time.
Also still wondering why this all has to change so much?
I mean you changed the skill window some time ago and allot of players still hate it.
Would like to see the an option to keep the current style of UI. Either as is now or for thecnicsl reason in te nrw system.
Is this the place to report bugs? The scanner probe UI is buggy. You cannot “click” to chagne the radius of probe. But you can drag the slider to change it.