Community based project: Creating a new default UI

[vakuum]

Originally Posted by Dolby

What the dev team is looking for is ideas on possibly combining windows, making some windows better, and the window graphic design. They aren't really looking for default window placement using the current default interface.

But they should!
Currently the default UI is a big mess when it comes to HCI (Human Computer Interaction).

In the screenshot:

• The white rectangle is the "enjoy" area, this should be as free as possible from any ui stuff to give the user a good experience. (You don't play eq2 to look at the ui. The ui is there to help you play the game, and you want to view the game as much as possible)
• The bottom part starts with the hotbars in the middle (This creates a vertical line from the center of the view down to your hotbars so you only have to move your eyes down\up to hit keys).
• Over the hotbars are the targets with health\info, this makes it easy to watch your own health and others while finding the key you wanted to press.
• All the way to the sides are less important stuff like track, "eq2 start menu", map and the buffs you got on you by effects and such.

What I want in a new default UI:

• Hotbars are center aligned
• The compass\clock looks good between target and implied target on top
• A smaller track window (the default is way to wide)
• That everything has a place (look at my agro meter or melee auto attack, it has no alignment and looks "out of place")
• The "enjoy" area is as free from UI stuff as possible

And yes, my UI setup is far from pretty, but it's very friendly to my eyes when it comes to how much time I need to find the important stuff. And it also let me enjoy the games as I see most of the game and not much UI in the "enjoyment" area

[deKoven]

Originally Posted by vakuum

But they should!
Currently the default UI is a big mess when it comes to HCI (Human Computer Interaction).

In the screenshot:

• The white....... Much, much snippage.
• The "enjoy" area is as free from UI stuff as possible

And yes, my UI setup is far from pretty, but it's very friendly to my eyes when it comes to how much time I need to find the important stuff. And it also let me enjoy the games as I see most of the game and not much UI in the "enjoyment" area

It ain't bad, yes. It doesn't answer my needs though; I have a monitor with the older style sizes. Moreover, one of my biggest criticisms of all these interface ideas is the common practice of covering the bottom of the window with stuff/clutter so that the nearer one is to something, the harder it is to see/target. For some of these one can move things around but for others the UI dev has made assumptions that make moving things not so easy.

I've used 3 different UI's since starting play; Fetish, ProfitUI and RickF. Currently using RickF but it certainly isn't my idea of an ideal UI. I really hate his bags and am looking for a replacement. I've other things which I've replaced so that my UI is a hodge-podge of relatively unrelated items.

A REAL pet peeve is the broker window and the practice of putting buy and sell in different window tabs. When I have an item for sale I want to hit the broker key and have the Sell side of the window show me what the price is, currently. The only one I know of that has this feature is the Fetish broker. All the rest I've looked at are of the Buy/Sell... etc. tabbed style.

I guess I would say to devs of interfaces is stop a bit and think about how your product looks to others. What you think of as forward thinking and "greatest since sliced bread" is my poison and goes into the bit bucket. A viable UI for the masses is minimalist but with extra "stuff" that can be easily plugged in (and self-containment belongs right here in the equation) after one has experience enough to be able to make decisions about them.