UI has grown to be quite cluttered over the years, here are some ideas.

[-Krux-]

"I shouldn't have to scroll so much to see so little"

 

Maybe it's just me - but it's bothersome.

At the least, I see better ways to organize the information on screen and show more information at your fingertips without requiring input for every little thing.

Let's start at the front of the ship? Star Chart - ok, it's an aesthetic preference, that's fair. But why do I have to toggle that one little button to be able to deploy my extractors which also is required to see the resources of a planet? I'll digress for a second here because I recall the earliest days of the UI design being far more informative than this redesign. Planets in those days shows you resources on mouseover, didn't they? One example of why the old blue UI was better.

The fix? Minimum effort, put the extractor button over the nightwave banner. Heck, you can put it left of the Kuva Lich icon. No more toggle, no extra mouse click. Some of you might laugh at the "1 additional mouse click" but quantity of input is (at least was) a metric measured to determine good, intuitive UI design. You want to cut down on it as much as you can while maintaining organized on-screen information.

Syndicates - 3 categories have 2 options in them. ... Let's make a category for Open Worlds and each location gets its own row? Simaris could offer the simulacrum right there as well. This is another constant throughout the UI, wasted space. But I'm going to follow through and be specific.

Codex - The latest sin trend in UI design, LARGE BUTTONS, BIG PICTURES. We got 2 rows of quests at a time. Before I continue, let's side-eye my 2k resolution with smaller UI scaling in my display settings. I don't know how many different items that shrinks so it's possible a setting here is to blame. For reference, an image of my codex:

I have a lot of wasted space. I'm assuming we're all seeing it like this though. That said - smaller images, more columns, more ROWS. I shouldn't have to scroll so much to see so little.

That's all I'll touch on, the rest is kinda nitpicky - that is what's worth addressing. Next - mid ship:

The foundry - Oh boy, the foundry.. where to begin? The items themselves, we got 2 columns, 3 rows, and a ton of sh** to build. Doesn't really mix well. Like the codex, we got unused space all around the interact-able menu. The blueprint buttons could be a little less wide, have a 3rd column, and MORE ROWS. Next, the categories. Geez...all those categories... it might help to have a few people sit down and have a think tank about the new ways we adjust the categories, so there's a lot of possibilities to cover in great detail. I'll leave this concept on the table though to start and move on to the next thing: It's ok for some items to appear in multiple categories, it just has to make sense. This is somewhat demonstrated by the 'Ready-to-build' and 'In-Progress' categories. Sub-categories should exist (Warframes, weapons- is it a blueprint, or a part? Appearance, is it a helmet, weapon skin, ephemera? - all sub-categories), and generalize the parent categories so there a fewer of them. If there are too many, generalize more and specify as you trickle down.

Mod Station - Another one with a lot of categories but I'd suggest a different approach than the foundry. Filters. The 'Sort By' acknowledges that there are different properties than can be looked at, but we're limited to sorting those values. If I wanted to see any rivens for shotguns that have multishot, I can't be that specific. I can look at the rivens category and search 'shotgun' but if I have a lot of shotgun rivens or a lot of multishot rivens, I haven't succeeded with my search attempt. With the growing number of mods in the game, search rules seem more and more relevant. That doesn't mean dropping the ability to sort, either. Also..again, MORE ROWS. I'm scrolling through a whole lot of mods by 3 rows.

The arsenal is a mess, Quiet already went over all this in her youtube video. I don't need to repeat her points. I'm not skipping it because it's fine, it's just beat to death.

To the back of the ship (spoilers ahead if you're a new player):

Similarly to the star chart, I understand the initial operator menu and Focus menu are aesthetic choices. Regardless, I don't mind the Focus tree at all anyway. But why do you have 2 links to essentially the same window?? When you click 'Appearance' - whooaaa it goes downhill fast. I'm using the top-left corner of my screen to adjust a lot of appearance options for my operator. You could at least expand the visible menu to cover the rest of the left side of the screen. You could break out some of those items into a similar menu next to this one. This UI probably aggravates me the most. At least separate clothing colors from clothing pieces, it's so jarring and random. And why does the focus daily cap have to fade out? Leave it there, you're literally not using the screen space anyway, put the number somewhere at least.

I know I said I would avoid the nitpicky stuff but I got just one thing I need to mention because it's a weird oversight that I need to address that won't get read by anyone who could/would do anything about it but I need to say it anyway. The Mod Station mod scrolling, as well as mod scrolling within the arsenal, has a weird pop-out on the mod scrolling "off-screen". Of course it's not really going off-screen, but god forbid we use anything outside the central 20% area of our monitors. So when you scroll down, the mods to the right slide in.. The mods to the left hard vanish. When you scroll up to go left though, they fade in and the pop-out doesn't happen on the right side.

So I did my damnest to not just complain about the UI but provide beneficial solutions. I know it doesn't matter and I'm 99% sure nothing will come of this, but sometimes you just gotta get it out.