Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the revisions that have been being made to the User Interface (which have been outstanding, and make the game much more accessible), I see an opportunity for a low-development-cost, lightweight improvement that seems to me would have a high impact and return on usability.

I've found that to be truly efficient in most regards, a number of interface elements are needed at a glance. Commonly, these interface elements are related to one another, and a particular set is required for a specific task, or group of associated tasks. A more flexible, slightly less cumbersome, and, most importantly, persistable method of configuring these sets, saving, and recalling them would be ideal.

To illustrate a scenario where this usage would be ideal, allow me to describe how I configure my interface and hardware while playing Eve. I have a set of three monitors, we will call them Left (L), Center (C), and Right (R). C and R house the client, as a fixed borderless window, and L allows for web browsing, Instant Message services, etc. My ship, window tray, and main HUD elements are centered on the C monitor. The R monitor holds a variety of interface elements, depending on what I'm up to.

While mission-ing, for example, I like to have my overview, people and places, current target, and locked targets docked prominently on the left hand side of R, and then have a smaller inventory window to allow me to keep tabs on cargo space, missile supplies, etc. as well as enable me to easily click Loot All.

But when I'm checking the market changes with my morning cup of coffee, I prefer a very different interface configuration to be effective. I like to make as much real estate as possible available for the Market so I can use the chart effectively, and then I like to have a window or two for item info, my asset overview, as well as my local inventory.

What this is all leading me to is, as earlier stated, an easy way to manage this transition between activities. After some thought, to most intuitive and effective method that comes to mind is through the implementation of a customizable grid system. One where the user can define a grid, or multiple grids, with horizontal and vertical partitions where interface element borders would stick to. Allow the grid to be saved, along with all the interface elements it's currently in possession of, and recalled later.

This would make my experience much more enjoyable.

An idea on the technical implementation. Stop reading here if you're not interested in how I think this should work from a development perspective. Take this all with a grain of salt, while considering my complete naivety concerning the EvE UI architecture.

'Main Window' has the ability to host a collection of interface elements.
'Main Window' has the ability to host a collection of Grid elements, with an upper limit on collection size greater than (4?).

'Grid' inherits from interface element.
Grid may contain a single child Grid.
Grid may contain a single Interface Element.

This implementation, in where a grid has no more than one child grid at any time, would likely be easier from a management and routing perspective, but would be slightly less flexible from an interface users perspective. It would lend itself to spiraling grid designs (think the visualization of the Fibonacci sequence, or the golden ratio, etc).

Alternatively, grids could be allowed to contain multiple grid children. As long as their coordinates were carefully managed, this would be a much more flexible option as far as interface usability is concerned.

Anyway, that's just my two cents on the subject of interface management. It's looking great, and from what I can tell it's greatly improved over what it was once

That's incredibly insightful, and very much worth the time it took to post. Bravo!