Overall, the new game UI isn't great. There are a lot more unnecessary clicks required to get anywhere, important information is hidden and useless information is displayed. The layout is cumbersome to navigate around. It would take too long to go into all of the problems of the UI (there are many terrible aspects to it), so I thought I'd concentrate on just the Mission Board for now:
(Yes I realise you're looking to hire UI designers.)
1) Fix the bug where the 'UI Back' keybind doesn't work on the 'Select Mission Board' screen.
2) Just get rid of the 'Select Mission Board' screen. It is completely unnecessary and only wastes the time of anyone looking to do missions. There are only three options, it doesn't need to take up a whole screen. Literally all that does is waste players' time. You could easily put all three of those options back on the main Station UI screen without negatively affecting anything.
3) Get rid of the 'Community Goals' mission area. There is no point having a screen that displays no information. At best, there will be what, 2 community goals at a time? There doesn't need to be a whole branched section of the UI for this. All the information for a CG can fit into a normal mission info panel. If there is an active CG somewhere, just add the faction that is offering it to the list of factions offering missions on a station's Mission Board and highlight it as 'Community Goal' by putting it in a different colour. Like it used to be. It was fine.
The main mission board WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
4) Why is the option for Thargoid missions half hidden off the bottom of a scrolling window pane? Why is there a Thargoid mission option in places (presumably 99% of the galaxy) there are no Thargoid missions? Why is there even a scrolling window pane? You only have 9 options and half the screen is just blank wasted space. JUST MAKE IT FIT ON THE SCREEN.
5) Maybe there are people that can identify factions by the mugshot of the completely interchangeable NPCs that represent them on the mission board, but adding a minigame of 'Guess Who?' to taking missions seems like a very bad idea. JUST WRITE THE NAME OF THE FACTIONS ON THE SCREEN.
6) The faction info panel doesn't need to be a pop out panel that hides everything else on the screen. The screen has a lot of wasted space, just put the faction info back on the main screen like it used to be. There is no benefit to the current layout, it is just harder to find information. Just merge this info box back into the main screen again, so we can see the info clearly and it's not in the way of everything else.
7) What does "No active missions with depots" mean? It's not a bad idea making it easier to drop off commodities for missions (although because of all the other UI problems it's still harder than it used to be), but can't you call it something like "No missions needing deliveries" or "Deliveries for missions" instead, so it actually explains what that button is for?
8) There is absolutely no need right now to have missions divided into separate pages for each faction and then further subdivided by type of mission. Yes, sure, if you're actually going to put in a decent amount of missions finally then it would make sense. But at the moment most of the UI is either blank or has a box saying "0/0" which is just a waste of space and gives a terrible impression (like going into a store where 90% of the shelves are empty). If you select 'all' then there is already a filter option to show only missions of a certain type. It is completely unnecessary to have exactly the same screen but with a permanent filter on it somewhere else. Either increase the number of missions available so that there are always 5+ missions of each type being offered by each faction, or else just put the missions back on a single page like it used to be.
9) Clicking on a faction to narrow down the list to only missions from that faction is a nice idea. But don't make it so clicking a second time on that faction selects all of them again. UI buttons should be consistent, not changeable. Make it so that a click on a faction selects missions from that faction, and a click on a new button that says 'All Factions' shows all missions again.
10) Put the name of the faction that is offering a mission immediately after the title of that mission in any list of missions, and put the faction name immediately below the mission title on the mission info page. Knowing who is offering a mission is super-important information, and at the moment it takes a lot of effort to find out. This especially applies to active missions listed in your Transactions tab. This was terrible in the previous UI as well, but needs sorting out.
11) Why don't donation missions list the rewards in the mission list like every other type of mission does? Just fix it.
12) I note that unavailable missions no longer display the reason why they are unavailable. I don't see why this was removed, but now it just means there are missions listed at the bottom of the board that you can't click on but you have no idea why. Fix it please. While I'm on the subject, I don't think CMDRs should be prevented from taking missions simply because they're currently in a ship that is too large or too small. That's like preventing CMDRs from accepting a combat mission if they're flying a Hauler. We can change ships you know!
Mission info page
13) Why is there a key in the bottom right of this page that tells you which symbol means Reputation and which means Influence? Those symbols are only used in one place on the screen, and that place is surrounded by empty space. Reputation already has the word 'Reputation' in the reward box. Just write 'Reputation' and 'Influence' next to both of the rewards so people can easily see what they will be getting.
14) The little + symbol is really confusing because in the previous UI that was the symbol for Influence gain. I presume it now means that you get both what is above the plus and what is below the plus as rewards, but it's confusing and completely unnecessary. We can already understand that we get everything shown in a list in a box. Just remove it.
15) Just put all the important info about a mission in a small box on the centre left of the page. We don't want to have to look all over the page in order to find out the stuff we need to know. Spreading things out to cover the whole screen makes it harder to use, it's not an improvement!
Ok, that'll do for starters.
(Yes I realise you're looking to hire UI designers.)
1) Fix the bug where the 'UI Back' keybind doesn't work on the 'Select Mission Board' screen.
2) Just get rid of the 'Select Mission Board' screen. It is completely unnecessary and only wastes the time of anyone looking to do missions. There are only three options, it doesn't need to take up a whole screen. Literally all that does is waste players' time. You could easily put all three of those options back on the main Station UI screen without negatively affecting anything.
3) Get rid of the 'Community Goals' mission area. There is no point having a screen that displays no information. At best, there will be what, 2 community goals at a time? There doesn't need to be a whole branched section of the UI for this. All the information for a CG can fit into a normal mission info panel. If there is an active CG somewhere, just add the faction that is offering it to the list of factions offering missions on a station's Mission Board and highlight it as 'Community Goal' by putting it in a different colour. Like it used to be. It was fine.
The main mission board WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
4) Why is the option for Thargoid missions half hidden off the bottom of a scrolling window pane? Why is there a Thargoid mission option in places (presumably 99% of the galaxy) there are no Thargoid missions? Why is there even a scrolling window pane? You only have 9 options and half the screen is just blank wasted space. JUST MAKE IT FIT ON THE SCREEN.
5) Maybe there are people that can identify factions by the mugshot of the completely interchangeable NPCs that represent them on the mission board, but adding a minigame of 'Guess Who?' to taking missions seems like a very bad idea. JUST WRITE THE NAME OF THE FACTIONS ON THE SCREEN.
6) The faction info panel doesn't need to be a pop out panel that hides everything else on the screen. The screen has a lot of wasted space, just put the faction info back on the main screen like it used to be. There is no benefit to the current layout, it is just harder to find information. Just merge this info box back into the main screen again, so we can see the info clearly and it's not in the way of everything else.
7) What does "No active missions with depots" mean? It's not a bad idea making it easier to drop off commodities for missions (although because of all the other UI problems it's still harder than it used to be), but can't you call it something like "No missions needing deliveries" or "Deliveries for missions" instead, so it actually explains what that button is for?
8) There is absolutely no need right now to have missions divided into separate pages for each faction and then further subdivided by type of mission. Yes, sure, if you're actually going to put in a decent amount of missions finally then it would make sense. But at the moment most of the UI is either blank or has a box saying "0/0" which is just a waste of space and gives a terrible impression (like going into a store where 90% of the shelves are empty). If you select 'all' then there is already a filter option to show only missions of a certain type. It is completely unnecessary to have exactly the same screen but with a permanent filter on it somewhere else. Either increase the number of missions available so that there are always 5+ missions of each type being offered by each faction, or else just put the missions back on a single page like it used to be.
9) Clicking on a faction to narrow down the list to only missions from that faction is a nice idea. But don't make it so clicking a second time on that faction selects all of them again. UI buttons should be consistent, not changeable. Make it so that a click on a faction selects missions from that faction, and a click on a new button that says 'All Factions' shows all missions again.
10) Put the name of the faction that is offering a mission immediately after the title of that mission in any list of missions, and put the faction name immediately below the mission title on the mission info page. Knowing who is offering a mission is super-important information, and at the moment it takes a lot of effort to find out. This especially applies to active missions listed in your Transactions tab. This was terrible in the previous UI as well, but needs sorting out.
11) Why don't donation missions list the rewards in the mission list like every other type of mission does? Just fix it.
12) I note that unavailable missions no longer display the reason why they are unavailable. I don't see why this was removed, but now it just means there are missions listed at the bottom of the board that you can't click on but you have no idea why. Fix it please. While I'm on the subject, I don't think CMDRs should be prevented from taking missions simply because they're currently in a ship that is too large or too small. That's like preventing CMDRs from accepting a combat mission if they're flying a Hauler. We can change ships you know!
Mission info page
13) Why is there a key in the bottom right of this page that tells you which symbol means Reputation and which means Influence? Those symbols are only used in one place on the screen, and that place is surrounded by empty space. Reputation already has the word 'Reputation' in the reward box. Just write 'Reputation' and 'Influence' next to both of the rewards so people can easily see what they will be getting.
14) The little + symbol is really confusing because in the previous UI that was the symbol for Influence gain. I presume it now means that you get both what is above the plus and what is below the plus as rewards, but it's confusing and completely unnecessary. We can already understand that we get everything shown in a list in a box. Just remove it.
15) Just put all the important info about a mission in a small box on the centre left of the page. We don't want to have to look all over the page in order to find out the stuff we need to know. Spreading things out to cover the whole screen makes it harder to use, it's not an improvement!
Ok, that'll do for starters.
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