2.0 Readability and usability of the new UI list panels

[Олег Поленин]

There are several panels in game that show information about a list of objects.

The 2.0 update brought several updates to these panels, some of which improved the experience, while others, especially the graphic style, decreased their readability and usability.

I'll make a general comment first and then will jump to specific panels directly:

 

General comment

There are two concepts introduced in new UI that, together, dramatically decrease the readability of various screens:

• the extreme use of various frames, borders, varying backgrounds,
• the ui paradigm further moving away from a tabelar/grid layout towards a chain of specialised UI boxes.

These two together make it harder to find specific informations, or to quickly review them in a batch. I'll show exact examples below with change suggestions:

 

My lands screen

• What was a single row of actions has now been split into two lines. It made the list longer and otherwise very cluttered.
• The middle row wastes a lot of space, and yet the icons feel kind of hidden, unimportant, or not even a button.
• It's now very hard to read through all the bases to inspect if they are not lacking in soldiers.
• The base name is lost in the clutter, due to the size and new font.
• The "produces" row: for 95% of gamers, or even more, this row will always show 0 on theirmain base and 99,99% it will show 0 on all bases that are not currently played in. It was far beter before, when it only showed values when they really existed.

Suggestions:

 

Messages screen

Not much changed, but suggestions:

• time in same row as title, right-aligned (better position to compare and focus eye on in grid, less space);
• a way to quickly recongize message type (war, trade, alliance, share etc.) - perhaps an icon column to the left of the whole message block, or a small icon + color coding of the header background?
• smaller action buttons, in-box (so that user knows it's related) and bottom-right aligned

 

Build screen

• "View details" totally not needed - contains 95% same info as already displayed (the only difference being defence/attack stats)
• resource cost very unclear due to items being spread along the row;
• lots of horizontal bars, again - hard to differentiate different blocks
• build time placed in quite a wrong place;
• building level in two unrelated locations;
• squares icon (to the right from base name) - I was even surprised it leads to anywhere; nor really clear;

Suggestions:

 

Edit: Trakced players screen

• This screen would also love an update to one-liners with two single buttons at the end.
• The player-specific "Track" button should be renamed to "Show" or "Show player", as the player is already tracked (misleading), also the same label is used for new players (so if we leave the first one "Track", perhaps this one should be "Add"?)
• The add new player button ("Track") is very small as it was before. Many new players have trouble noticing it. Perhaps a bigger, gold one should be used? (same for other similar screens, I assume)

 

Edited January 2, 2020 by Олег Поленин