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User Interface/User Experience Feedback
kaelspriest
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 8 Arc User
Some thoughts on the Neverwinter UI/UX while I'm waiting for the servers to come back online 
Overall, I think the UX is absolutely fantastic. I love how almost all of it is designed to keep your eyes in the game world. I cannot begin to express how much I love the sparkle trails - when I'm running around between objectives, I feel like I'm navigating the game and not the minimap. I also love that the 'bad ability incoming' warning is consistently presented in the game world. Overall, this game has a really well-designed combat UX. I'm pleasantly surprised.
However, there are a few minor issues I still have with it:
1) Cooldowns on encounter abilities are only visible in the hotbars. This is a departure from the overall game design of keeping players' eyes on the game world. It's not as bad as in other games because there are only 3 encounter abilities, but it still takes players out of the world and into the UI.
You might take a cue from addon designers in other games: semitransparent "Power Auras"-style overlay indicators near the center of the screen that provide relevant UI information without taking players' eyes away from the action.
2) Debuffs on nameplates are tiny and difficult to see, and as far as I can tell there's no indication of their duration. This display might be appropriate for other players' debuffs, but I shouldn't have to squint and peruse 5-6 tiny icons on a moving nameplate in order to see if my own is still active. This is both unpleasant and distracting me from the action.
I'm not sure if there's a good way of presenting debuffs, but at a minimum, the player's own debuff icons should be larger than everyone else's and indicate their remaining duration in some way.
3) It's not clear when my action points are full. The 'crystal' thingy looks full 1-3 shots before it actually is. This requires me to look more closely at the bars to see if my dailies are actually lit up, rather than just monitoring the meter out of the corner of my eye.
It would be fairly simple to use color and/or 'glow' effects to provide that information more clearly on the crystal-vial meter thingy. A progressive color change (say, from red to gold), combined with a 'glow' when filled, would probably be ideal.
4) There's no way to remap the 'lock on target' keybind; it's permanently assigned to Left Ctrl. For players who have remapped the rest of our keybinds to make them more reachable (left-handed players and those of us with fine motor disabilities are particularly likely to have done this), this can be a really awkward key to hit, much less hold while hitting other abilities. Left-handers might find it impossible, as they're likely to have re-built the keymap around IJKL or the numpad.
5) The 'Unable to perform this interaction at this time' error message is unnecessarily verbose, enormous, and stacks too many times (I think I've gotten up to 5). It covers up valuable information; mine can go halfway down my screen.
There's no reason to stack multiple occurrences of the same error message. Actually, I'm not sure there's any reason to display multiple errors at all; the game should simply display the most recent one. And the length of the messages should be re-evaluated (no single message should span 2 lines of text).
6) The party window, or 'team' or whatever you call it, suffers from the same disease as in most MMOs: the statusbars and icons that provide relevant information are only a couple of pixels high and have very poor contrast, while the portraits are absolutely enormous, so the whole thing takes up a huge amount of screen real estate while still managing to be difficult to read.
Now, most of the information in this window could and should be redundant, but unfortunately, it's the only way to see your teammates' health status without repeatedly finding each one in the game world. I need to use it to set priorities, but once again I find myself needing to take my eyes off the game to read it.
7) There doesn't appear to be a setting to force friendly nameplates to persist as long as they're injured (or similar). There might be a good reason for this at max level (are there larger-scale combat events where the screen would be cluttered?) but it's the major reason why I'm complaining about number (6) at all.
That's about it Not sure how much I like the AH, vendors, etc., but those have never been a major issue for me because I can take my time navigating them.
Overall, I think the UX is absolutely fantastic. I love how almost all of it is designed to keep your eyes in the game world. I cannot begin to express how much I love the sparkle trails - when I'm running around between objectives, I feel like I'm navigating the game and not the minimap. I also love that the 'bad ability incoming' warning is consistently presented in the game world. Overall, this game has a really well-designed combat UX. I'm pleasantly surprised.
However, there are a few minor issues I still have with it:
1) Cooldowns on encounter abilities are only visible in the hotbars. This is a departure from the overall game design of keeping players' eyes on the game world. It's not as bad as in other games because there are only 3 encounter abilities, but it still takes players out of the world and into the UI.
You might take a cue from addon designers in other games: semitransparent "Power Auras"-style overlay indicators near the center of the screen that provide relevant UI information without taking players' eyes away from the action.
2) Debuffs on nameplates are tiny and difficult to see, and as far as I can tell there's no indication of their duration. This display might be appropriate for other players' debuffs, but I shouldn't have to squint and peruse 5-6 tiny icons on a moving nameplate in order to see if my own is still active. This is both unpleasant and distracting me from the action.
I'm not sure if there's a good way of presenting debuffs, but at a minimum, the player's own debuff icons should be larger than everyone else's and indicate their remaining duration in some way.
3) It's not clear when my action points are full. The 'crystal' thingy looks full 1-3 shots before it actually is. This requires me to look more closely at the bars to see if my dailies are actually lit up, rather than just monitoring the meter out of the corner of my eye.
It would be fairly simple to use color and/or 'glow' effects to provide that information more clearly on the crystal-vial meter thingy. A progressive color change (say, from red to gold), combined with a 'glow' when filled, would probably be ideal.
4) There's no way to remap the 'lock on target' keybind; it's permanently assigned to Left Ctrl. For players who have remapped the rest of our keybinds to make them more reachable (left-handed players and those of us with fine motor disabilities are particularly likely to have done this), this can be a really awkward key to hit, much less hold while hitting other abilities. Left-handers might find it impossible, as they're likely to have re-built the keymap around IJKL or the numpad.
5) The 'Unable to perform this interaction at this time' error message is unnecessarily verbose, enormous, and stacks too many times (I think I've gotten up to 5). It covers up valuable information; mine can go halfway down my screen.
There's no reason to stack multiple occurrences of the same error message. Actually, I'm not sure there's any reason to display multiple errors at all; the game should simply display the most recent one. And the length of the messages should be re-evaluated (no single message should span 2 lines of text).
6) The party window, or 'team' or whatever you call it, suffers from the same disease as in most MMOs: the statusbars and icons that provide relevant information are only a couple of pixels high and have very poor contrast, while the portraits are absolutely enormous, so the whole thing takes up a huge amount of screen real estate while still managing to be difficult to read.
Now, most of the information in this window could and should be redundant, but unfortunately, it's the only way to see your teammates' health status without repeatedly finding each one in the game world. I need to use it to set priorities, but once again I find myself needing to take my eyes off the game to read it.
7) There doesn't appear to be a setting to force friendly nameplates to persist as long as they're injured (or similar). There might be a good reason for this at max level (are there larger-scale combat events where the screen would be cluttered?) but it's the major reason why I'm complaining about number (6) at all.
That's about it
Not sure how much I like the AH, vendors, etc., but those have never been a major issue for me because I can take my time navigating them. Post edited by kaelspriest on
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8) It would be really nice to be able to adjust the chat window background transparency without also making the buttons/etc. visible all the time.
9) Sorting auctions by current bid isn't working. Auctions that haven't been bid on seem to come up first no matter what, in a random order completely unrelated to the minimum bid (this is probably the result of your database software sorting algorithm not knowing what to do with entries where the field you're sorting by hasn't been defined).