UI feedback

Alt-Tabbing back and forth between Live and QA.

Generally a thumbs up.

Opening Menu

• Dark and not pleasant now. I wasn't sure I didn't like it until I saw the Resume/Start on World Map Menu. That one works much better with the new UI look. Now going back to the first menu, I can see that the background really makes the buttons unpleasant.

(One day we really need some not-default Unity buttons. Ugly. The opening menus look like something I have put together before, and I am not very good at making buttons. A modern UI includes more than just changing the color scheme/borders. Currently the "Login through Steam" button is the best one in the game. )

Hints

• Look great.
• You still need to double their width so they aren't word wrapping so much.
• Slider is questionable, very close to the color of the window.

Utility/combat bar:

• Glad the gold is gone, not happy with the darkness of the glyphs. They literally are making the world around it feel like it is hazy... murky... dark. And it's broad daylight. It makes me feel depressed.

Inventory

• Like that the gold is gone
• The above seems to make it harder to read when the inventory is in front of cluttered light backgrounds, like a bunch of trees during daylight
  • I feel like increasing the opacity of the background a bit will alleviate this
  • Test by trying to read your weight when the window is in front of something light colored
• Confirms slider suspicion in hints, in front of some backgrounds it's hard to differentiate between the slider and the empty space it moves in. Try in front of trees, the sky.
• Consumable word is too big for it's tab

Mailbox

• Looks pretty good
• Makes me think a UI wide Opacity increase of a small amount will be a good idea.
  • Put the date and time readout, send mail button, Inbox quantity in front of something light.

Compass:

• Increase opacity.

NPC Dialog

• Still like trying to read a book printed on postage stamps
• Increase opacity. Go talk to someone so that he's behind the UI, there's also lighter background, and you are also behind the UI. Your eyeballs will break.

I'll stop saying increase opacity, seems like it's needed system wide.

Social menu, Lot Deeds Town Crier window

• Buttons are very similar to the background, indistinguishable if there weren't text there.

Character sheet

• Belt and cloak icons are semi-transparent.
• Other than that this new window gets me excited.

Skills window

• You still have the gold around skills, which works with the grayer icons. If there were no border the window might be depressing, so if you do remove the gold you may have to increase the brightness of the icons.
• I think I like the ropes between skills being gray now.

Glyphs window

• Yeah, too gray

Chat window

• I can read even with transparency on in this one. I like the feel.

Property Manager window

• Looks real nice, slider bar excepted
  • I can see the dividing lines on the bar clearly here, and thus realize that the bottom, lighter color of the slider is much harder to see than the top, darker color

Crafting station window

• Much easier on the eyes
• Slider seems a bit more visible on this window
• Buttons as well, still grim and dark
• Not sure about the quantity selection field, it seems like it would be really easy to not understand the arrow is a button, and/or to totally miss the field altogether

Vendor window

• Opaque background, I can see the text!
  • So well that the brightness of the text/icons may be able to be turned down now, just a tiny bit. Maybe.
• When listing, the pop-up window is hard to see due to text in front of text (opacity).

 

Oh, and the buff debuff icons in the upper left are even harder to see now because they are gray and still the size of a grain of rice. I hate them. Impossibly small.

 

Oh, my God, the Add Credit window in the Tax interface is really bad because it is unmovable + there is so much text behind it showing through that the "Tax credit can be... blah blah" explanation is virtually unreadable.

Cancel button is really hard to see as well.

Pay taxes is bad but not as bad.

 

Initial reaction to the Controls menu is "Hmmmm... I'm not sure that I like that at all" regarding having the columns having nothing dividing them but space. I guess my eyes like columns having some lines dividing them.

 

Peripheral Lighting warning hard to read, text over text.

 

Radio button selector in Matchmaking Mode, Gray dot in a gray circle, not attractive. The circles have the top of them flattened off as well.

 

Lot interface (double clicking on the marker)

Just as hard to read, if not harder due to text being washed out by character colors (Opacity, yes, I know I wasn't going to keep mentioning it but when it makes things incredibly hard to see I can't not).

The boxes breaking up this window are similar to the buttons in the buttons in the opening menu. Thus you can expect first time users to think they should do something, and being confused for a bit before finding the cogs. Not expecting change now, just an FYI.

 

Add Player window in Lot Access dims the text in the window behind it. This works extremely well, and a bunch of the ^^ previous ones that aren't readable might be if this were done in those windows (like vendor listing window) (not windows that are first level, seeing the world behind them, like Inventory).

Edit: It does dim the background text in the vendor, but doesn't help, still too much overlapping each other.

 

I am not sure if the new interface is in its finished state, but ugh...I am not a fan of the new UI as it appears right now: gray, drab, not as easy to see key elements because they are dull colors that blend in with the background that shows through the transparency.
The options menu is especially heinous. The check-marks and slider markers are harder to see, especially with the transparency of the window (they get lost in the background imagery).
Also, all the dark lines that border everything make the options window look too busy (there is a gap between the outer border and the actual window - through which the background can be seen).

It would be nice to have an option to remove transparency from all the windows and from the paper doll, or even to have the options of sticking with the old UI.

 

Well, I don't want the gold borders back now that I've seen them gone.

 

I also am happy the gold borders are gone, but I think the whole GUI change has been executed poorly. I would have expected a bigger GUI change. Just removing some borders and replace it with black is not the way to go imo..

 

I appreciate the fact that you guys are working to try to improve the UI. The Main issue is that you guys still haven't addressed the fundamental problems with the UI. You still can't scale the action bar to make it bigger or smaller.. you still can't move the party unit frames. Buffs/debuffs overlap when there's more than 3 rows of buff/debuffs blocking party members health bar. (This is extremely annoying when trying to heal). Debuffs, buffs reactive skills are still extremely hard to track.Now backgrounds are too opaque. buttons are too desaturated. You will never make everyone happy with the UI. That's why other mmos allow people to fully customize their UI. Either Using Lua or allowing us enough options to move stuff around how we like it. some suggestions.

1. Allow us to Move unit frames around and give us the ability to lock them down where we want them.
2. Allow us to detach the Buff/debuffs from the Unit frames.
3. Allows us to scale the Action bar/Utility Bar height and width
4. Party Frames should have an option to have a healer mode for example you can keep them with the default look or switch them to something like this. This healer mode can be adjusted to be displayed either vertical or horizontal and allow us to adjust height and width.

 

There is always room for improvements. Overall I very much like this first iteration of the new gui. It looks much more appealing compared to the previous one. This was a long overdue step in the right directon. Now tune the usability.

 

And please, don't forget to remove "Player xyz is on/offline." inside the dialogue box!

Beside this, as Vladamir said: the icons seem a bit to dark ...
The gold border in the skill tree looks good.

 

Just did the new build and I feel like the glyph brightness has been increased to an almost perfect level.

 

Wow, thank you for this very thorough feedback. We are still in the process of improving and polishing things for the upcoming release. This feedback will help us address some details that may have otherwise been missed.

@Vladamir Begemot I agree that the opacity of backgrounds is a system-wide problem, and intend to fix this soon. Also, I'm glad that you are enjoying the adjustments that we made to the skill icons.

I know that there is still a LOT of work to do on the UI beyond just changing the color scheme/style. As always, we will continue to iterate and polish during each release cycle based on the feedback that we receive.

Thanks again to everyone for your feedback. Keep an eye out for more improvements in upcoming builds!

 

@wizardsmoke My pleasure, and thanks for letting me know you saw it. Even saying something like:

really is helpful for us, because we can then shift our mindset from "do they know what we are talking about?" to "They know, so now I can just make a list of observations and not harangue the Devs repeatedly to make sure they know."

While I have your attention, changing "This body is being looted by someone else" to a pop-up hint (the type that fades) instead of it being a window that forces us to click "Ok" would go a long way toward making looting easier during battles.

 

Sure, I'll make a note of that and try to get that changed soon.

 

This is all EXCELLENT feedback, everyone! So much attention to detail, @Vladamir Begemot , you rock! Wzardsmoke and I are absolutely taking note and wrangling what we can based on it... After I've made all the elements and tweaked as necessary, Wizardsmoke will be re-crafting many of the old window/UI configurations (that required the "gold" color to work the way they did), to make the best use of the new "grey corroded metal" paradigm... Choosing what needs to recede from being a distraction (the essential goal of this entire UI change from a visual standpoint), versus what needs to remain eye-catching (for ease of functionality), is the biggest set of decisions and tweaks we are making this current stage... More to come!

Scottie ^_^

 

My 2 cents worth. Im glad to see work is being done on the UI but I think cosmetics is the wrong focus. I don't really have a strong opinion on gold border vs not gold border but I do have serious concerns about functionality.
Please:

• Allow me to move windows
• Allow me to resize windows
• In particular please make the quest dialog window resizable or at least make it big enough to show all the dialogue without needing to click continue...
  
• Please do something about the organization of the quest book! (This one is huge!!!)
  • I want to be able to filter out quest (main story, not main story, filter by path)
  • I really REALLY want to be able to search (It is very frustrating to just have an open book that is several pages long and try to look in it to find out what you need to do for the one quest you are trying to find information on)
• I would much rather see limited resources being spent on making the UI more useful instead of changing the cosmetics
• One of the drawbacks with changing the cosmetics.... better looking for one person is ugly for another (Point in case: Its not make or break for me, but if I'm honest I liked the gold borders better. Everything was much more clearly defined and thus easier to see.)
• If you are going to change the look it might be better to spend the time adding the functionality for people to skin the UI to their tastes.
• You could even save yourself some work and just have a community contest and give Cotos to the top 10 skins created by the community.