The Thinking Behind UI Design / UX in Odyssey

drstrangelug

drstrangelug
ObiW said:
It's a mess isn't it. I wrestled with it for a while until I slowly stepped away from it.
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Thats the most likely one to get fixed. Any UI linked to ARX purchases will be fixed. Or maybe FDev will just assume because nobody is buying suit customisations that nobody wants them.

Fdev has a habit of assessing usability on the assumption of it being good enough already, like multicrew. "If people use it they'll put more add more features to it" was an actual quote just after multicrew delivery. Facepalm

"Hey Dave - these cheese only pizzas arent selling ! I guess people dont like pizzas."
 

sqzbox1

S
I also have to say that I am absolutely gobsmacked at how much worse the UI is. It adds to the confusion of info on screen, misses important stuff, prioritizes all the wrong stuff, and increases the number of control inputs to do anything. Can't refuel from starport services seems weird. Can't see the rewards in missions without actually entering the mission. And don't even get me started on the difficulty of doing anything in the maps! I can't believe that a professional game developer would be designing such poorly constructed UI's. Have none of these guys actually studied UI design? Disappointed. I guess I'll get used to it but I'm so frustrated right now that I've just quit.
 

JTFireblaze

J
Remember when we all complained about the Xenobiology scanner and they removed it? Maybe if we keep complaining about the UI they'll just remove it from the game too...
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Sylow said:
You're saying that the interface is also bad on a controller?
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As a controller pilot, I want NOTHING to do with this new UI. An example of good controller UI is most (but not all) of our ship holographic UI / HUD.

Also remember that the D-pad on a controller is basically the equivalent to the hat on a HOTAS when it comes to navigating menus, etc, so a UI that's designed to be efficient for a controller should also be efficient for a HOTAS as well. When you combine controller pilots with HOTAS pilots, I suspect K&M pilots become the minority, though I fully support versatile keyboard mapping (I also use my keyboard to augment my controller for non-critical things like switching to the FSS).
 

wilderness

W
drstrangelug said:
Fdev has a habit of assessing usability on the assumption of it being good enough already, like multicrew. "If people use it they'll put more add more features to it" was an actual quote just after multicrew delivery. Facepalm
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I remember that quote very well. I was taken aback, thinking "maybe people aren't playing feature XX because the implementation sucks"... multi-crew, indeed comes to mind. If there was a good implementation of Multi-crew, you can be sure people would be playing it more.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
JTFireblaze said:
Broken and nobody uses it because it's broken? Definitely won't fix.

So by that logic we must all use the broken UI to show frontier that it is worth the extra dev effort to fix :confused:
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Or I stop playing Horizons in the hope that Frontier then ignores it and does NOT backport this terrible UI. It's summer, I can do that!
 

Azelus Skye

Azelus Skye
Can someone please explain to me what the hell they were thinking when they made this livery screen?

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Sunyavadin

Sunyavadin
There are literally two circumstances for which I, if operating as a UI designer for Frontier, would design something like this.

1: (Less likely) If a team was working on a companion app for phones which allows you to replicate parts of the interface on your phone, which you could then have on your desk next to your keyboard, say, constantly open on the galmap so you do not need to bring it up on your main screen each time you want to use it.

2: (More plausible) If there was a bunch of development in progress on bringing the game to GeForce Now and/or XCloud, and an interface was desired by management which would work on touchscreens once gamers were able to stream ED to tablets and the like.
 

INSTG8R

INSTG8R
Sylow said:
Indeed, i also would be very much interested in that. Also add: i want them to play the game just for a few minutes on the following setup: fly a ship with using properly set up HOTAS from one base to another. Make them just scroll through the list of items in your storage once, to see that the panels are bound properly. After landing the ship, make them either move around and fight with a HOTAS (as if that was possible) or then take away the HOTAS and make them move somewhere, use the terminal and pick up a mission.

I am absolutely posivite that nobody on their whole team, neither designer nor developer nor tester, used a HOTAS even once during the whole development process.
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ABSOLUTELY! I played this from Day 1 with an X52 Pro and it was completely intuitive, recently switched to an X56, while a little more fiddly I still could do everything on my HOTAS as always outside of typing systems in the search..This abomination barely works well using any input method....
 

Just

Just
fennster said:
Just log out to horizons every time you need to navigate somewhere right?
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I would laugh, but I do quit the game and start Horizon to change ship loadout if it includes switching several modules to the ones stored on other ships.

After I literally wasted 40 minutes(!) trying to do it in Odyssey I will never again experience this painful, frustrating, senseless jumping up and down through outfitting options tree we have to do now in OD.

They just removed even more options / shortcuts we had to go through while outfitting in alpha - which was already on the edge of being useless.
 
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JTFireblaze

J
Sunyavadin said:
2: (More plausible) If there was a bunch of development in progress on bringing the game to GeForce Now and/or XCloud, and an interface was desired by management which would work on touchscreens once gamers were able to stream ED to tablets and the like.
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Even if it was being designed for touch screens, it would also have to support Keyboard and Mouse, Game controller, HOTAS. A good designer would be able to design for ALL of those. Yes, we'd probably end up with slightly bigger buttons, but honestly that is not the worst thing in the world.

The graphic heavy UI with no labels, redundant clicks, and let's face it just broken screens are the real problems.

The Livery screens - the stuff that is a front for all the microtransactions, is broken. UI fails to update when applying cosmetics half of the time, it's clunky as hell and half of the items you see in the lists aren't even applicable to the piece you're customising.

If they haven't got that working correctly and that's where the money comes from, I have little faith in the rest of it.
 

Sylow

Sylow
ObiW said:
It's not unplayable as others say (imo) but it's certainly a step back. The most extreme example (and unfortunately one which we'll all be experiencing rather often) is going from the Galmap into the Sysmap.

Guess how many button presses that requires from the point of looking at a star to viewing the sysmap?

11. Yes, that's ELEVEN button presses.

With a mouse it's not such a big deal but this is a bit of a joke and I can't believe why they didn't just move the sysmap icon further up on the right hand section, if nothing else.

How this went through Alpha and now is in the live version, I haven't got the faintest.
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It was below the critical mass of being reported by at least 50000 people, each and every day, for three months straight. So FD decided to ignore it.
 
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