Forums » Suggestions
New interface tabbing
Right, here is a long ranty post about the new interface. Mostly I am happy with the new interface, but some things in it are far less intuitive than in the old interface. This is understandable, since it had far more functionality, but I still feel it is far more complicated to use than it has to be. I have played the game for 4 days now, and whilst it took me about 5 hours to become fully comfortable with the old interface, the new one is still causing me some confusion. Let me go into things I don't like about it in detail:
1. The mission tab from the top chat area has gone. It is there when outside a dock, but not there when docked.Instead it is in your PDA->Missions->Mission logs.
Could you please make both of them one way or the other so they are consistent with each other?
2. The interface is split up into nicely seperated tabs. That is good. However the tabs are nested in completely un-obvious ways. First you have one level of tabs along the top, then another along the side, and then a third layer squished in on the same line as buttons go looking like buttons along the bottom. There is no way of easily distinguishing the precedence order of different tab levels, or telling side and bottom tabs from butons, as they look just like buttons. In fact, I often find myself clicking the buy tab and expecting it to buy one of selected item in the menu.
Could you please make the tabs look like tabs and not buttons, and make the tab precedence more clear by better splitting up the layers?
3. The under construction welcome tab does not belong in commerce. It should not be there. It has nothing to do with commerce. I expect you knew that already thogh.
4. "Your PDA" tab does not seem to nicely integrate with the rest of the interface. In fact it seems to be just a random collection of things that should go elsewhere, but which happend to be avaliable in flight. For example functionality Your PDA->Ship->Cargo menu provides could more logically go into Commerce->Commodities->Load/Unload tab. Or the other way around.
You could probably safely make all the "My PDA" items as top level tabs in their own right, and make the whole interface avaliable in-flight, greying out inaccessible tabs.
1. The mission tab from the top chat area has gone. It is there when outside a dock, but not there when docked.Instead it is in your PDA->Missions->Mission logs.
Could you please make both of them one way or the other so they are consistent with each other?
2. The interface is split up into nicely seperated tabs. That is good. However the tabs are nested in completely un-obvious ways. First you have one level of tabs along the top, then another along the side, and then a third layer squished in on the same line as buttons go looking like buttons along the bottom. There is no way of easily distinguishing the precedence order of different tab levels, or telling side and bottom tabs from butons, as they look just like buttons. In fact, I often find myself clicking the buy tab and expecting it to buy one of selected item in the menu.
Could you please make the tabs look like tabs and not buttons, and make the tab precedence more clear by better splitting up the layers?
3. The under construction welcome tab does not belong in commerce. It should not be there. It has nothing to do with commerce. I expect you knew that already thogh.
4. "Your PDA" tab does not seem to nicely integrate with the rest of the interface. In fact it seems to be just a random collection of things that should go elsewhere, but which happend to be avaliable in flight. For example functionality Your PDA->Ship->Cargo menu provides could more logically go into Commerce->Commodities->Load/Unload tab. Or the other way around.
You could probably safely make all the "My PDA" items as top level tabs in their own right, and make the whole interface avaliable in-flight, greying out inaccessible tabs.