Talk:User Interface Improvements

Problems with current UI (moved from main page)

(These are just gathered from comments on the forums, and ones I've heard from helping new users) -- —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Benjamin Linden

• User interface is rendered as part of the standard frame render cycle. Thus it does not use recognisable OS-standard components and lags whenever the sim does. Could seperate this to use a general platform-independant kit (wxWidgets?) - although a lot of work!

• Users confused by a plethora of options that aren't related to their current situation. A user with no interest in content creation still has to deal with a huge number of related options on the pull-down menus. "Build" button on bottom toolbar is the only thing there related to building.

• Too many valuable items are on the client debug menu. I've seen several Live Help calls in which users are sent to these menus! If they are needed for solving technical problems encountered by regular users, they shouldn't really be part of an "easter egg".

• Mac OX X complaint: Mac OS X implements right-clicking with Control-click. The Mac OS X SL client implements right-clicking with cmd-click.

Considerations for the proposed UI

• Users are generally used to Menus so removing the Menu entirely may not be recommended given that it may not be possible to reproduce all the functionality there. However a better reorganisation of the menu, and possibly having the menu contextual and hidable would improve things. May even take some ideas from the MS Office Ribbon bar. Matthew Dowd
• The idea of regions needs careful thought - users could get annoyed if they go to click on something in world which is in a corner of the viewer only for a part of the UI to suddently popup in the way! Matthew Dowd
• Consideration of how these regions would interact with HUD's attached to that position in the viewer needs careful thought to avoid the UI interfering with existing (and future) HUDs. Matthew Dowd

GUI and (eventually) client scripting

Whatever design we come up with, ease-of-scripting (or at least the ability to script at all), should be part of the design-parameters.

As I've mentioned before, the WoW client paradigm would be a good one to examine and emulate--at least the overall concept of making virtually everything in the GUI scriptable. http://www.wowwiki.com/Widget_API http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_API

Saijanai Kuhn