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What makes a UI good or bad in your opinion?
iridescence
Member UncommonPosts: 1,552
Was wondering about this . I often see games criticized for having bad or "clunky" UIs and somewhat less often see UIs praised but have very rarely seen people go into detail about what they like or dislike about said UI designs.
Personally I look at UI as a tool. My main pet peeve is when I feel like devs make UIs harder to use for strictly aesthetic reasons. Like hiding things and forcing you to click many extra times to get at something just to avoid any screen clutter. The other obvious annoyance for me is when a UI has clearly been designed with consoles in mind. If you port your game to the PC you should make a mouse and keyboard friendly UI for it.
Comments
I really only have two points to add about UIs
*) The more I have to think about a game's UI - the less the developer probably did. I am generally of the mindset that the less UI the better, but nothing tends to not work well (unless you have a stellar game design to get away with it).
*) I can forgive an awful lot in layout if they let me rearrange and resize stuff.
On the first point, I totally agree.
On the second point, see the first point, if the developers did their job, you would not need to redo the UI. This includes button lay out, as well as HUD.
Customizable is the first and foremost aspect for me. Not everyone likes their UI set up the same way. What works from some may not work for others. Let me move the windows/bars where I want them
I like my 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock positions open.
The thing that really bugs me is switching between mouse and keyboard. Let me do things with either. Let me choose if I want to click or keystroke and allow me to do that
Your comment about console and PC UIs is spot on. Too many times I have experienced UIs built for consoles (or with consoles in mind) that outright suck for PCs.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
One thing to add: quite simply, good graphic design. You can have two UIs that are both easy to use, but if one has poor fonts and bad choice of colour it will show. Good design, even just aesthetically, is a mark of quality. If I see poor design, even if it is just an ugly font, I will suspect I will find amateur design elsewhere in the game. First impressions matter.
Don't ask me to define "good graphic design" - if i could do that in a few succinct sentences I would go work for an art college. But I know it when i see it.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Difficult to put a finger on it, but a couple of things come to mind.
First, untitled buttons. If your buttons (Paperdoll, Spellbook, etc.) don't have text titles, at least give them tooltips when moused over, and make that tooltip appear instantly as well.
A second thing that pops to mind is hotkey management. All hotkeys, including stuff like the mouse scroll wheel should be bindable, and if the game uses an action button grid like most MMORPGs, make the buttons display what hotkeys they're currently bound to.
Third, ingame browsers are not a good idea and nobody should use them. Looking at your, Darkfall and LOTRO, as well as a couple of other titles here.
Fourth, the UI should function fluidly. No delays when opening window.
Fifth, and keeping on with the topic of windows, if a window is so big it needs a scrollbar (except when it comes to windows displaying plot text), it's probably too big.
That's what I could think off the top of my head, but really, it's difficult to try to describe the perfect UI. I guess it would be something the user feels is so intuitive they don't even notice it's there.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
Nonsense. Different people have different physical controls for playing the game. Some have a mouse with 17 buttons. Others with only two plus a scroll wheel. Others use a trackball instead of a mouse, or have only a touchpad and not a real mouse. Some have a keyboard with a ten-key section, while others don't. Some want one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse, while others would prefer two hands on the keyboard if possible. Others prefer to use a gamepad.
Some people have a single monitor, while others will spread the game window across three or more. Some have much higher resolution monitors than others. A UI built for lower resolution monitors will make things look unreasonably tiny at a higher resolution, while a UI built for a higher resolution may have menus cover up so much of the screen on a lower resolution monitor as to make the game awkward to play.
And that's before we get to physical limitations in the user. Some people are colorblind, or can't read tiny text. Some extensively use computers at work, and to have the same physical motions when gaming at home would be likely to cause injury. Some have limited use of one hand.
You're not going to be able to make a single canonical UI that works well for everyone. A UI that works great on a developer's machine but poorly on nearly everyone else's is a very bad UI. The way to make the game playable for most or all of the people who would like it if they had a UI that could adapt their needs is to give the end user a lot of options.
Good UI will show me any info I might want at a glance, unless it's info that's not available through UI at all.
Good UI can be set so that in battle all possible character actions are a single click or keystroke away. If it's not doable by pressing a single key, then it can't be done at all during battle. Switching target is allowed to take exactly one additional click or keystroke, except while healing, when selecting target should also be doable by mouseover.
Good UI is always right. It will never display wrong information due to lag.
haha, exactly this.
I got a nasty shock when I first logged in to ArcheAge and saw that huge minimap splattered across the screen ... first time I had ever seen it done as an overlay like that.
I like flexibility and I mean a lot of it. I like my UI to be movable and keep the main view area clean as well as the upper areas and peripheries. It must be resizable and be able to reshape. I prefer bars , but blocks work as well given the some game mechanics. Since a lot of MMO have sequenced events or action , that's how I like to arrange them if marcos aren't available. I also like mod-able UI. There use to be some very talented people in gaming who made great UI's for games. Vanguard was last game I played with a horrible UI , but greats modded UI's that enhanced the game. I do think the advent of consoles has killed this aspect of UI's and gaming. Closest game I've stumble across that has a UI , that's even moderately adaptable has been SWTOR. Saying that, using the term moderately might be an exaggeration.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR