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Updates to the DOFF UI following Season 9.5
druhin
Member Posts: 7 Arc User
I have written some detailed notes on what I see as potential usability improvements to the DOFF UI which was introduced in Season 9.5.
While there were some improvements made, there are some improvements still that I think could be done, in the interest of making things a bit more clear to the players, as well as overall appearance.
I have uploaded an album consisting of 4 images. If the notes aren't detailed enough due to JPEG compression, I'll write them down as follows. Perhaps someone at Cryptic will take note, and consider some of these changes. WARNING! Wall of text incoming...
ALBUM:
http://imgur.com/a/ntuEl#0
While there were some improvements made, there are some improvements still that I think could be done, in the interest of making things a bit more clear to the players, as well as overall appearance.
I have uploaded an album consisting of 4 images. If the notes aren't detailed enough due to JPEG compression, I'll write them down as follows. Perhaps someone at Cryptic will take note, and consider some of these changes. WARNING! Wall of text incoming...
ALBUM:
http://imgur.com/a/ntuEl#0
Overview Page: http://i.imgur.com/4gvhnX2.jpg
R&D School page looks a lot clearer than the current Commendation page. Consider revamping appearance/icons for Commendation page, to match R&D?
Some of the above have similar names like Science (Commendation) and Science (R&D) yet have distinctly different icons.
The button at the bottom of the page linking players who wish to get more duty officers, currently does nothing at all, and results in a black page. Bugged/Remove?
Roster Page: http://i.imgur.com/ydFRQSx.jpg
Consider detaching the "Dossier" information into a side-window, similar to the behavior of the current "Skills" window, where blicking on a skill, gives you information on what the skill does, and how much it can be improved.
As a result, the Roster page will look a lot cleaner by default, and easier to read the list of Duty Officers.
With the removal of the "Dossier" from the main window, each individual Duty Officer "line" can be expanded to fill the window (towards the now empty black space)
Additionally, updating the Filters at the top, to expand along a single line, with full text, instead of current double-line, with truncated names (Speciali..., Q... etc)
Consider moving the "Request More" button to the bottom of the window, and making it more prominently visible.
Assignments Page: http://i.imgur.com/4m64UVs.jpg
List of Suggested Improvements to Visibility:
1. Expand "Title" of each assignment to fill out to the right side of the box, thereby eliminating the "double row" effect of some assignments.
2. Remove the "Result" box from the Assignments list. Estimated Results are visible during the Planning stage anyways. Additionally, the "Requires" box should be updated to fit, without the need of a scroll bar.
One consideration here, might be to update the "Reward payout" based on assignment rarity. A "Rare Assignment" should always pay more than an "Uncommon Assignment".
3. Merge the "Current Map" and "Personal" Assignment pages into a single list of Assignments. Less flipping between pages, clearer for the user.
4. Add a "Time to completion of next assignment" near the bottom of the left hand side of the window.
BONUS. Add a "Filter dropdown" to the top of the window, where players can sort the available assignments by Department, Duration, Name, Rarity etc. This dropdown list could be added to the "In Progress" list as well.
Planning Page: http://i.imgur.com/D9QMifZ.jpg
For Assignments where the officers assigned will be "removed" such as Colonization, or Prisoner transfers, the Automatic Assignment should always prefer the COmmon quality Colonists/Prisoners, over potentially automatically assigning higher valued quality officers.
Additionally, it should be a lot clearer to the user that there will be people removed as a result of this assignment. Potentially include a "Confirm" button after Begin Assignment for those specific assignments.
Post edited by druhin on
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Comments
IMO this would be a step in the wrong direction. Many of us are doffing because we want the rewards. Its better that we can see the rewards for all the assignments on a page without having to click on each one and inspect it individually. With the new system I'm spending probably a quarter of the time I used to looking for good doff assignments and that one feature deserves most of the credit for that.
Well, Thomas the Cryptic Cat tweeted several images of "improved tooltips" coming to the DOFF UI at some point. Wouldn't need boxes cluttering up space to show the rewards, if you could simply "hover over" an Assignment to see what it rewards.
But then you still have to inspect each one individually. The reason the change was good was because all the info is on the screen at once and you can decide if you want to do it while you scroll down. On this particular item your trying to improve the aesthetics to a marginal degree and your sacrificing the ease of access to information. We already have eight lists to look through in each zone to find the rewards were after. We don't need any extra steps in seeing what they are.