Please fix the new UI or give us the option to use the old UI!

kempiedempie

K
The new UI is dissapointing. There was nothing wrong with the old one, it just worked!

In the new UI we can't see the rank progression percentage, we have to guess how much we progressed by looking if the bar moved.. it was soo handy to see the actual percentage!

The outfitting.. oh god what a mess! Doing anything requires so many more clicks, it takes much more time and gets really tedious.

The map got completely changed too.. for the worse.. you can't set waypoints to bookmarked stations without having to go into the system. You have to go to a station's details to see it's distance from the star.

Everything about the new UI is just way less intuitive! It requires so many more clicks to do anything as well. And I'm not the only one with complaints about the UI, many people have brought up even more points about the new UI that should be adressed.

I have one question to ask: why? Why did you change it? What was so bad with the old ui, that everyone was already used to and was easy to navigate, what was so bad about it that you had to completely change the whole thing? I'd say it was absolutely perfect and needed no changing, and I doubt I'm the only one that thinks so!

I'd love an option to disable the new UI in the settings, in case that's not possible for some reason, fix it! It's pretty bad..
 

INSTG8R

INSTG8R
There is not one redeeming thing about the ENTIRE UI. ALL of it is clumsy, terrible and adds nothing but useless complications. I remember being upset when they changed the cockpit UI with Horizons but at least in the end it was actually an improvement.
 

Kailoren

Kailoren
There was nothing wrong at all with the horizons UI, and I have no idea why they felt the need to force the fleet carrier ui on us at every station. The outfitting UI looks like it was designed by someone who'd never seen elite dangerous before. Its so unintuitive and clumsy.

I'm not opposed to change, if the change is better than the previous version. This entire new UI is just awful to navigate around and some of it doesn't even make sense (in particular the outfitting UI). and WHY do we still need to watch the hardpoint retract animation when removing them??
 

Zieman

Zieman
Exactly.
Horizons UI is in every way superior to current Odyssey UI.

Two good advice for the UI designer & their manager, that they were unaware of or completely ignored for some unfathomable reason:
Don't "fix" what's not broken!
Add to it and tweak it if needed, don't change a working game UI to an abysmal mobile app ui for no reason.
 

nolandurk

N
Dear frontier employees,

although the new UI looks like there went a fair amount of work into it, please remember: failure is always an option. It seems you deployed a complete failure of UX just because you invested time, effort and money into it.

The new UI probably looked great when the mockups were made (hopefully you made mockups, although it doesn't seem so), but it seems you never put the slightest thought into how it would feel. The UI seems to be made for small tablets, touch-driven. I have seen such UIs which wanted to make things easier by making stuff bigger, spreading it around, and in general providing less information scattered a much wider area.

  • The missions list doesn't provide easily visible information about how good I am standing with a faction. Why was it effectively removed?
  • Commodity missions: there's no difference between "gather X for Y" and "deliver X to Y" icons. Has there been testing at all?
  • Commodity missions: What was once sensible is now crap. Before, the completable missions were in the missions list, so you didn't need to switch to a different view just to select some next mission you want to do. Now it is: Main screen -> missions -> missions (why again?!?) -> wares -> select mission -> click "deliver commodities" (why?!?) -> select amount -> confirm -> go back to missions list -> go to the now separate "completable missions" view (why?!?) -> complete mission.
  • Galaxy map: When in "trading view", you can select which commodity to show. Except... the dropdowns are not synchronized to the "details view". Why? The settings are not remembered... at least in the dropdowns. On the map, the previously selected commodity is shown, but the dropdowns show something completely different as they always reset. Import/export selection randomly resets.
  • Scrolling down the left tool bar by pressing a button and keeping it pressed on my X52 doesn't work. I guess this hasn't been tested, too.
  • The "transactions" view in the cockpit often contains duplicate items.
  • There is no consistency at all between different screens. Nearly each one has a different layout or a different navigation.
  • No sync (or barely any sync) between different commodity data views.
  • Very often I'm given the choice for a station to sell my commodities that doesn't have a large landing pad despite having turned on that filter. On other occasions, I'm getting shown a commodity at a station that doesn't sell it... while still being shown in the galaxy map for that specific station.
  • Navigating to a station sometimes fails because... the station is not present in that system somehow.
  • Navigation to a station sometimes resets once I enter that system.
  • Randomly, non-related information is shown on some screens.
  • Some screens are black, but it's interactive; I can hear the buttons when navigating, and can exit that screen with a bit of luck.
  • Galaxy map flickers sometimes.
  • Auto-pilot landing on stations sometimes randomly freezes without doing anything for a while.
  • Horizons showed me I was ranked at the top with federation and empire, yet Odyssey showed it correctly.
  • Horizons offered me stations only present in Odyssey.
  • The servers are so unreliable you don't seem to have done any load testing.
  • ... and a gazillion other issues I've forgotten.

I have a few conclusions:
  • get rid of the UI/UX team and employ someone who has a brain.
  • get rid of the testers (given you have some, which I doubt) and employ poeple having a brain that do more like "check new UI... OK, it's there, test passed".
  • get rid of some devs - there are bugs present now that let me think the new code is copy-pasta and had no process of peer review, or they have no brain, too.
  • get rid of the project managers who had something to say. again, brain...
  • don't miss the "beta" phase.

I am seriously wondering how it is possible to release a piece of software with such a low quality. I didn't expect it to be perfect, and some things always need to be fleshed out or have bugs that just went through, but this release contains so many obvious problems it is far far beyond an "oopsy". Sort it out. Do some marketing magic and call this an accidentally released alpha or whatever. Because this is alpha quality software. You can't seriously tell everyone you're proud of it. I would feel ashamed of it.

(sorry for hijacking this UI thread, but the majority of this is about UI)
 

Lobokai

Lobokai
It was so much easier to get information on routes on the old map. Not sure how, but they added more clicks, more options, more icons… yet this netted less information and more time to do simple route map route planning.

I use third party sites now. Still much faster than EDO
 

Mineria

Mineria
While loving the look of the new UI there are quite a few things that got pretty tedious.
Personally I play most of the game with a HOTAS that has quite a lot of buttons, X56, and some of the changes downgrade ease of use, mainly because there are additional movements and clicks to be made.

I also miss something in the space mission panels, like where is the filter that shows the Legal missions only and how do we distinct Bounty Missions or are they gone?
Actually playing Horizon atm. since I can't find these in Odyssey.
 

nicedevill

nicedevill
And what are those white/blue pulsating circles in the Galaxy/System map that inform you of what is selected/your current location? Who asked for those?!

Please remove them. Thanks in advance!
 

Kestrel71

K
Zieman said:
Exactly.
Horizons UI is in every way superior to current Odyssey UI.

Two good advice for the UI designer & their manager, that they were unaware of or completely ignored for some unfathomable reason:
Don't "fix" what's not broken!
Add to it and tweak it if needed, don't change a working game UI to an abysmal mobile app ui for no reason.
Click to expand...
Absolutely - what they needed to do here was to keep the original Horizons UI and, instead of showing the flat list of all stored modules, show the organised grouping list that has been added in ODYSSEY. With the new UI, it's impossible to scroll through items and see how adding that to the ship would change stats like shields, damage, speed, jump range, etc. A UI designed to configure a ship should focus on displaying exactly that type of information and it should be informationally dense. Then there are completely useless items like the listing of ships on the right-hand side of the main outfitting panel that does absolutely nothing other than occupy space.
 

Abysinth

Abysinth
Another vote for the old U/I.

I work on building User Interfaces, and changes need to be evolutionary not revolutionary.

FDev, have a look into Agile and 2 week sprints and offer regular small changes to Elite, that way you will not longer have waterfall deployments to break so much in one go. Minor changes mean minor fixes just 2-4 weeks later.
 

Kestrel71

K
Abysinth said:
Another vote for the old U/I.

I work on building User Interfaces, and changes need to be evolutionary not revolutionary.

FDev, have a look into Agile and 2 week sprints and offer regular small changes to Elite, that way you will not longer have waterfall deployments to break so much in one go. Minor changes mean minor fixes just 2-4 weeks later.
Click to expand...
I mostly agree with this -- having spent many years working on UI, despite largely being a back-end dev, UI should never surprise a user and it needs to focus on its task. The outfitting screen has lost all functionality in that regard - its primary function is to equip modules to the ship - that means you need to be able to move modules around easily and you need to be able to see specs and changes to existing specs if that component is applied. The new UI does NONE of this which is an absolute failure.

As for SCRUM or any of the other agile methodologies - I'd be surprised if they weren't already using it, but process won't fix fundamentally bad design and implementation decisions. The problem here is largely at the management and designer level. Dev is still to blame - they have a history of notoriously bad patches, but this release is all about hitting a date and management cutting things off at that point. That said, any dev lead worth his salt would have pushed back and become an absolute thorn in the side of anyone who pushed these UI design changes down.
 

Abysinth

Abysinth
Kestrel71 said:
I mostly agree with this -- having spent many years working on UI, despite largely being a back-end dev, UI should never surprise a user and it needs to focus on its task. The outfitting screen has lost all functionality in that regard - its primary function is to equip modules to the ship - that means you need to be able to move modules around easily and you need to be able to see specs and changes to existing specs if that component is applied. The new UI does NONE of this which is an absolute failure.
Click to expand...
If the users do not say "Hey, that's better" then I have done it wrong, although I do need to show the users sometimes.
Kestrel71 said:
As for SCRUM or any of the other agile methodologies - I'd be surprised if they weren't already using it, but process won't fix fundamentally bad design and implementation decisions. The problem here is largely at the management and designer level. Dev is still to blame - they have a history of notoriously bad patches, but this release is all about hitting a date and management cutting things off at that point. That said, any dev lead worth his salt would have pushed back and become an absolute thorn in the side of anyone who pushed these UI design changes down.
Click to expand...
The point of Agile is to issue updates to the users on a regular schedule; we did not and do not get this - we get it waterfall style. I wonder if it would be better if we got updates once a fortnight, or what ever schedule they choose to use.
 
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