Why Do We UI Like We UI?

[(PSN)d1771Hd]

It would be greatly appreciated if the new End of Game screen could be viewed and interacted with while loading out of the mission. Imo the ability to move your ship up and down in the current post game loading screen is completely unnecessary and is probably the reason that mission screen screen shows up briefly but isn't interactable until you're back in your ship. In a perfect world that End of Game screen would be accessible during that loading out time and would not disappear into a black screen before finally loading back into your orbiter. The transition back to your ship doesn't feel smooth at all. The same transition into missions has never felt good, even after different adjustments. Connecting to other players makes any flight animation there choppy and really just does not look great. I'd rather just have a black screen with game tips, or a fake stylized portrait of our ships flying through space or than the actual ability to move them up and down. 

Related to UI loading time, I know there are some improvements in the works regarding other screens, but the current 4-6 seconds it takes (on ps4 at least) to open the Kuva Lich screen is the worst example of this and feels really bad in it's current state and I'm wondering how much of that can be fixed.

 

[welshjemz]

As a still relatively new player (who is frequently baffled by elements of the game and am constantly referencing the Wiki or my incredibly patient clan), the new UI would be very off putting for new players as they would have no idea what a lot of the items would be. Icons only become recognisable after a long time of playing and becoming accustomed to the names, and being met with an array of icons that have no labels would likely be enough to make a lot of people just quit the game. Also getting parts but not knowing what they actually are seems a bit strange with labels off by default.

And not all new players are lucky enough to be in a clan to explain things to them...

Incidentally I do like that there is now a practice button for MR tests as I spent far too many levels not knowing that I could practice before taking the test....

[KittyKath]

I hope it's not too demanding but:

As much as I love the new UI, would it be possible to have an option in the setting to turn back to the old UI..?

I'm just asking for those that used to like the old UI... (And for those that might possibly find it more complicated somehow? I personally don't see how, but figured I'd ask anyways.)

 

 

Also thanks a lot for all the new content and hotfixes!

[drawmeadream]

Love everything except some things in the extraction screen, I've always valued being able to see mods and resources separate and them being sorted by type, might just be placeholder and actively being worked on but wanted to mention it. It's way to messy for me to keep track of what i actually got and I'd have to spend longer looking at that screen then i do now.
Not sure I like having to scroll down every time I want to look at how much exp i got cus most of the time i get standing from 3-4 factions at a time. I feel like factions should be at the bottom at least, weapon level feels more important over all 🙂
Finally getting an "amount of levels gained" number on your weapons would make me a very happy tenno (that never remembers what level my things were before i went to my mission)  😓

I also hope you will add a "right click to see details" on resources and rewards in the navigation screen just like in cetus/foruna bounties. I have a hard time memorizing the thousands of made up words in warframe and i'm sure non veterans could really use that as well 🙂 

Good luck to the UI team! Can't wait to see it finished!

[KCToxic]

50 minutes ago, [DE]Pablo said:

 

This screen is really pretty and I like how it looks a lot, but I am afraid that it will cause a loss of functionality if the mission progress screen we can check mid mission is changed to match. Because if the mid-mission screen looks exactly like this new end screen, with tabs and an opaque team diorama, then we won't be able to hit tab really quick to easily check our progress or pickups and still see or we'd be losing half the information without opening the full menu. Maybe an edited mid mission version with the player names in the center, stats on the bottom, and experience and loot info on the top with a transparent background?

The ability to interact with the screen during a loading screen would have to be added too, because the current screen you can't change tabs or scroll once you hit the loading screen. Having to hit a button to see stats would make that worse.

Will item labels be present in the final? It's impossible to tell what those prime parts are without labels nor is it possible to see how many of each resource you picked up. 

On a separate topic, the tooltips, I think we've all noticed how many tabs some tooltips have. Will it be possible to have certain tooltips with multiple pages pop all of them open at once when you hit tab? Especially if there's only one other page of the tooltip. Like relic tooltips, so we can see their location and the information about the relic all at once if we want to learn where to get one. 

[Tamagosci]

Personal opinions:

• Force labels for prime, weapon and warframe parts
• For the end of mission screen: merge items and mods (same grid but one after the other) and keep credits/resources separated
• Comparing two or more items now takes an excessive amount of clicks, especially if not in the arsenal
• Weapons in the shop should always show stats without hovering
• In the shop add a "Craft" button if you already own the blueprint (don't remove the buy blueprint button)
• Converting prompts to hold the button seems a good idea for the less important prompts
• Please change the "Select quantity" prompt: currently it takes a "long" time to open and forces your mouse back once it opens and the buttons to increase/decrease should be much closer (and preferably closer to the confirm/cancel buttons)
• Make it more obvious that the icon in the top left is a button
• Make loading tips availabe somewhere else too

Have you considered adding a complexity rating or "gameplay style" tags to warframes? (Damage, Tank, Control, Buffer, ecc...)

Ending with what i think would be an incredibly important thing to add: an in game poll system for the devs, with minor but useful rewards to entice players in filling it (like 3h boosters)

This system would add a way to collect feedback and filter it by account data like mastery rank or hours played in the last month, giving even more value to the answers.

 

Edit: i wanted to edit my post after reading what everyone else thinks, but after spending some time i noticed that 80% or more replies share the same thoughts and almost if not all replies think differently than the UI team about the approach to the new player experience so, in the hope that the replies are going to be read, i'm going to leave this untouched and let you guys think how much you value feedback (But seriously tho, add a poll system in-game)

Edited January 24, 2020 by Tamagosci
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[xRufus7x]

45 minutes ago, iPeer said:

Are we playing the same game here? This is a joke, right?

He isn't wrong. Most resources have unique icons now, Warframes, weapons and mods do as well. Things that don't are pretty limited to weapon/warframe parts and relics. The issue is those are really important to know ):.

[EmoScoobyDoo]

Personally I absolutely hate hold to confirm, and that mission end screen has too many issues. Seeing all affinity gains without the need to scroll and knowing much of X resource I gained and what this prime part is are factors that vastly out weigh seeing the 3 random players' warframes. 

[ThatsSoWitty]

The end of mission UI is goddamn awful. Out of all the UI (most of which I like more than what was there before) this is the worst I've seen from you guys yet. It neither needs or if it does need a change, burying stuff and making it harder to see like this is most definitely the worst answer on the table.

[Tombsite]

So how many people actually read the part where he acknowledged the problem with parts all looking the same before jumping to the comments to complain that the parts all looks the same in the (work in progress) mission end screen?

[drawmeadream]

39 minutes ago, Voltage said:

I just hope the profile UI shows relevant and useful information not bound to a long vertical scroll.

The changes you showed are nice visually, but also quite cluttered and lack function. I much rather have 95% of my screen showing rewards and numbers than 90% of my screen being my Warframe (or another player's) at the end of a mission. I also notice/have issue with the end mission screen showing items without an amount or name. Pictures without amounts/names are missing a majority of what the player wanted to know. Checking results mid-mission is usually because you know you got something and you want to verify an amount. Most of the statistics for the squad is also unnecessary. Crates opened?

The art team is immensely talented, but these changes, especially to the end mission screen focus really hard on looking good and not so much on ease-of-use and practicality.

Perhaps an easy compromise could be to make it a toggle, by default the rewards potion covers the majority of the screen but you can see your teammates blurred out in the background and a toggle at the top that says minimize/expand and it turns into the extraction screen we see in the post? I at least think that that would work for me, idk what other people think of this yet of course. (if they get complains about it and they want plus points they could of course add an in screen preference button, default minimized or expanded )

[WagnerianSlip]

1 hour ago, [DE]Pablo said:

Of course I said 90%, the other 10% is not so great, clear cases are Relic icons and weapon component icons, for the latter we do have a desired solution that adds the resulting item icon to a corner, but this task keeps getting pushed further and further down the queue, it is in the wishlist tho. And for the Relics we force the labels on always.

The problem is the relic system is pretty important and frequently used by the average player. And now it has been shoved in with the lich system as well. The fact that no one internally voiced concern about this makes me wonder if DE interacts with the game in a vastly different fashion than the majority of it's player base? And that is where some of the disconnect between the player base and the devs are coming from.

[PoistyNZ]

Just found its actually been fixed now...

Edited January 24, 2020 by PoistyNZ

[Arkennstar]

25 minutes ago, kapn655321 said:

You ever try to play EVE Online? I noped out of that game because of the deluge of information. "Paralysis from analysis." The more familiar we get, the more it's nice to have the information there.. but until then, early on we couldn't make use of it all anyways, and it can give players the impression that they are either stupid and unwelcome.

tl;dr Level up the complexity our UI with our profile, unless we choose it to be more or less complex at any time.
 

We don't really have the level of information that EVE Onliine has. Warframe is a very complex game in itself but it has nothing on EVE.

That said, I do agree with the fact that even the minimal info provided is overwhelming to new players. I would suggest making tutorials to deal with that but DE seems against that. So instead of having a UI system that automatically with our profiles, why not have a UI toggles. With 3 settings. Minimal, Optimal, Maximum. It can be changed from Game Options. Plenty games have this kind of thing. 

Minimum would only offer crucial information needed for the player, perfect for new players who don't need to delve too deep. Optimal wouid be for casual/mid level players who are dipping their toes in and starting to figure out the intricacies of the game mechanics. And Maximum can be for seasoned players who want as much info as they can from a single window.

[CxLL]

You have a really, really long way to go. Good luck.

[Cubewano]

While plenty are touching on the more complicated aspects of UI design and their wants, can I just ask if I'm alone on feeling like those mastery badges look weirdly out of place with the rest of the ui's visual style/aesthetic? And why is it being placed front and center for the mastery test ui over the already existing lotus sigils which are far more explicitly affected cosmetic items by the mastery exams that would probably be more pertinent to show than a minor icon frame?

I'd also be curious why a frame at all since apparently ui is deemed too busy as is, but that seems like a lesser conflict. 

[lukinu_u]

All of that stuff make sense, but I'm not sure putting stuff inside sub-menues is a solution to make stuff less overwhelming, or at least not of comfort for already experiend player.

Let's compare the old vs new power screen :

Yes, new one got the new cool aestetic, has cool videos for each power and show the difference between unmodded and modded abilities which is overall better looking and good for new players, but it lost the functionnality of the old one.
Since you don't have all power displayed on the screen if you are already experienced, don't care about the video and just want to rapidely check what that the exact new values of each power after tweaking your mods, you will need to manually move your mouse on each power and see what are the stats for each of them. It sure doesn't take more than a few seconds, but few seconds is too much compared to having all informations on the screen and rapidely checking in less than a second.

I'm not saying cool video and fresh layout like this is bad, but it's important to consider the QoL an overwhelming menue like the old one can provide.
If merging the good points of both is too complicated (which make sense), another solution would be to provide two variations with a possiblity to switch between the "normal" and "advanced" menu layout.

[Senguash]

47 minutes ago, [DE]Pablo said:

The compromise we arrived at to try and circle this square, was to use a variant of progressive disclosure, which in practice means we add more information, but put it behind rollovers or clicks.

As a veteran I have a certain bias against this philosophy, because to someone for whom the info isn't overwhelming all this means is more clicks having to move back and forth between screens to compare things that I feel should be on one screen. That said, I can aknowledge the bias, and I can also put it relatively well aside.

When I see something like this: 

I can't help but feel that if I were a new player the missing information would be a problem.

By hiding name labels behind hovering you would force me to remember what these things are.

And it would help me a lot to see the amount without having to hover.

By hiding the amount received you take an important tool in determining the value of things for example. If there's several thousand endo, 7 argon crystals and one of whatever the part in the bottom left is that helps me figure out that I'm dealing with a common resource, a rare resource and something more important.

Meanwhile the mods do have numbers leading me to believe I received one of everything else.

 

And then there's this, which is cluttered: 

Why is there still both normal and bonus xp being displayed? Who cares how much of the xp I got from either, just show me how much I got.

And why are the syndicates there at all? Let alone with both icon, rank, current standing, max standing and a bar with 4 different colors.

It's way too much info shown for something I don't care about, and it's misleading to new players to give them this much of a full breakdown of something they should just passively be gaining in the background while learning the game.

 

You're reducing clutter by starting with the wrong things. The amount of loot received is important early in the game!

So here's my suggestion: 
Combine xp and bonus xp into one number, remove syndicate standing entirely and then introduce the count of the loot received. 

This keeps information density similar while shifting priority to things that are both intuitively and de facto more important.

Don't get me wrong @[DE]Pablo , it looks great! But looks aren't everything.

I'm not trying to critizice your design philosophy in any way, and I'm not just a veteran asking for more info.

I'm just telling you, as someone who plays this game more than you, that it's the wrong information being focused on and left out.

[kofeyh]

2 minutes ago, Tombsite said:

So how many people actually read the part where he acknowledged the problem with parts all looking the same before jumping to the comments to complain that the parts all looks the same in the (work in progress) mission end screen?

If the acknowledgement is there, why does the mockup specifically illustrate that very acknowledged issue of items sharing the same iconography. Which prime chassis part is it exampling? They all look the same. If the mock up presented with labels on, for example, then perhaps it would be more evident the recognition and resulting design change, align.

The end of mission mock up is a very good example of what comments are referring to, the very thing that should echo the acknowledged issue, perhaps.

[Wiktoryk]

Why can't item labels be switched around to be on by default?Isn't it just a slight replacement in the game code?

[dstrawberrygirl]

Icons are great and unique images for different items are fine, but can you stop and consider just how many mods and resources exist in the game, and how quickly new players can pick up on what those icons mean? Even veterans have trouble - avionics for Railjack at launch (it's mildly improved now, but only mildly), the whole Parazon mod guessing game UI with colors that change depending on your UI theme, so when someone tells you that you have a match when it's blue and you only have white and thought that the line meant "yes, I got it, scratch that one off the list", etc.

I moused over different engines in Railjack to look at stats - no, you don't mouse-over any more, now you tab. And when you click on it the numbers on the right change! Great, now I click on a different engine, then back to the first... the numbers are not the same? Why is an engine affecting turret heat capacity? I swear my teammates are sick of hearing "I'm so confused" over the mic.

I don't have time to spend hours looking at whether things are better or worse by looking at one, then the other, then back to the first, then trying to remember which was which because the icons for each engine are the same, and if you scrap one then the others all move so you gotta go back and look at them individually again.

Give me information. Give me stats on-screen so I can compare without having to use a notebook! (seriously I have a big letter-sized notebook full of stats of things I had to write down because you keep hiding information.) I appreciate too much can be overwhelming, so maybe just give me engine stats when comparing engines and ignore the whole of the rest of the Railjack stats?

I am an early adopter of all things, so I'm used to things moving when I update an operating system, or an IDE, or a tool. I may have a bit of a learning curve, but the stuff usually turns up and I can get on with it. Warframe seems to be moving to the "hide everything by default!" mentality, which is driving me nuts because the way to find more information is not consistent and insufficient. 

tldr; I want stats, on screen. Or a consistent way to help me see, at-a-glance, which thing is better.

[Asdryu]

Ngl I would really love for mission indicators to be brought back into instant feedback rather than the "lively progression" BS.
Every update about UI and every new maps/missions makes me hope that they'll get somewhat better, but no. They just keep getting worse and worse.

No, I'm not gonna go back 500m in an extermination for that ONE enemy that is poopin' his pants when there's like more than 15 the actual needed right in front of me. No, there's no 6+ points of interest in the sabotage mission 'cause I've already done it and now I'm having troubles finding the indicators I actually need, one being extraction if it's considered too far.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Asdryu

[(PSN)grevenilvec75]

Even if I agreed with the premise that 90% of the items have unique icons (this is bald-facedly untrue) IT DOES NOT FOLLOW THAT NOT HAVING ITEM LABELS IS BETTER DESIGN.  

 

It doesn't matter that a Braton has a different icon than a Burston.  No one can tell them apart unless they've been using it a while.

[divi_india]

So anything about adding a warning when your pet is in statis and you try to start a mission?

[CeePee]

Do NOT add more hold to confirm selections, we play on a PC for a reason. We have a mouse that points and clicks, we know what we click and that's enough. Slowing things down is not a good thing. UI is supposed to make things easier and faster, not look fancy and be clunky to use.

More info, faster info, less flashy

Edited January 24, 2020 by [DE]Helen
Edited "More info, faster info, less flashy S#&$."