EVE Information Portal

Gut reaction to the dev blog before I actually test any of it:

Moving away from colours as a way to identify things on screen IS A DAMN GOOD THING. I'm somewhat colour blind as I'm sure a not-insignificant portion of the player base is, and identifying things by colour sucks, particularly in a visually dynamic environment.

Iconography is a much more universal language than colour. There's a reason male/female toilets at airports are marked with icons and not blue/pink coloured text.

1 - Cut a tiny part off one corner from the windows. This change in shape will go a LONG way to distance itself from the operating system look. Who cares if it's overdone and cliche.

2 - Also better window resizing would go a long way for players using small screens. (But I doubt this will be part of the UI pass this time)

3 - A light flash or zippy line animation to show WHERE windows get stored when closed or minimized would have been a dream when I first started playing and lost a bunch of the windows like the top of the Overview, then the overview itself trying to get it back.

4 - Smudged background textures of the navy and pirate faction ship colors as part of the faction themes.
Also automatic changing of themes depending on which faction ship you are flying at that time with a quick flicker as it changes
(I realize this will not sit well with many players and choosing a single dedicated theme should be optional.)

5 - Create a "number in local" in the same area with the System info/Route info/Mission info so that there is some other option for knowing how many are in local without the chat channel being open at all and reducing the space needed on screen for it. Perhaps with icons showing how many reds/orange and how many blues if you click it to drop down. It doesn't show the chat though.

6 - Fade the parts of the windows covering the ship AND module icons entirely so that it feels like the eye is focusing on something far away and allows quick access to all things in space for battle without needing to move or minimize everything. This fade could be a gradient of transparency so the corners/edge of the window not covering anything important are still visible.

I like the idea of making it look more holographic and think this should be pushed further. Perhaps a tiny light shimmer from the edges as you spin the camera very quickly.

I'd go further and as for scalable fonts all around. Pretty please with lots of sugar?

Serious Stuff First:
There does seem to be an issue with the station panel not showing up in Outposts. At first, I was annoyed. Then, I liked its absence as I discovered that I could actually keep my ship hangar and inventory windows open while in station, undock, redock, and have them still there. TY, TY. So all that you need is to get the undock button and station services on the neocom, and we're set.

Icons: By and large, they're an improvement. It's much easier to distinguish the simple shapes than the current Clip Art Jumble A and Clip Art Jumble B of the current set. I would like to see more distinction between People and Places, and the Journal: they're both books. I mean, at least a human silhouette next to a globe for P&P. The ISIS icon I trust is a placeholder; if not, that needs change too.


But, but... then how would CCP make money when they release new themes in the NES?

It looks okay, but it isn't a new UI, it's a new skin. However, the use of gradients is absolutely terrible and only dated by about 15 years, seriously it was used and looked equally as bad back when Macromedia Flash was a thing.

The concept of the blurring, transparent windows is really cool but a major overhaul of the UI is needed if you're going to call this a new UI.
Make sure you can modify the transparency settings.
Please, for the love of all things good, remove the gradients.
Make sure you aren't increasing the size of buttons and UI items as screen real estate is already at a premium with EVE.
Even better, allow for even further scaling of the UI if it isn't going to render things a jagged mess.

Honestly, screen real estate is a huge problem when it comes to EVE Online, you have a need to display massive amounts of data on screen at all times and to make that accessible. It is one of the most daunting things for a new player. There has been no real functional change in this area for a long, long time and a change to the UI - in my opinion - should be focusing on that instead of on an updated skin for the dated UI.

edit: I should say that I have no idea how you would go about presenting the information in a better fashion that it is currently, although I'm also not a UI Designer nor am I paid to do so - come on CCP, you can do better than this.

First I want to make one thing sure: When it comes to UI everyone is an expert. :P

Now my observations from the article.
You state that you want a "more Sci-Fi, and militaristic looking UI". (And then you state, that you want the look of items from the 70's...)
But the first image in the article shows fancy gradiented window tabs with a shiny blue as a background. Furthermore this bright area in the middle of the buttons makes the text less readable because the contrast between text and background goes down.

The fifth image in the article shows a set of UI elements. When I watched them closely in the big resolution they look more retro than modern to me.
Retro in the sense of that they look like a button with a translucent cap that is lighted from behind by a lightbulb. Which gives a bright center and a gradient to the edges.

Modern real world UI aims for even lighting with no gradients. Look at some modern edge-lighted push bottons like this one: http://www.gsna.com/images/products/large/SwitchPanel-GS07325SeriesLightedPushbuttonPanelMG.jpg
Or at LED lighted buttons with a even lighted cap: http://www.ledswitches.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/spl121.jpg
Or look at the dashboard of an airplane or a new car. They all aim for even lighted UI elements.

So what am I saying here?
Please consider less gradients, aim for more even lighted elements, and go for less bright colors. And look for a good contrast on the elements, people with bad eyesight will thank you for this.

And I like the simpler icons in the neocom.
And if there comes an option to import custom themes/theme colors, I think that would be great too. :)

I like the direction of this UI project.

What do you think, North-of-the-Wall team - how big is the chance to get a more readable font for all the text on screen during the duration of the project?

When I started playing the game two weeks or so ago, I almost stopped after a few days, as I had real problems reading the words on screen.

Switching to a higher resolution (and bigger) monitor helped a bit, but still at times I find myself squinting, taking off the glasses, approaching the monitor until my eyes are 20 cm from it, to analyze the white or grey pixels of the font, hoping to find out how the dots combine to form letters.

I suppose that might not qualify me for elite pvp. :) Never mind, my plan is anyway to get a good feeling how being blown up in lowsec and 0.0 feels, as long as my ships are dirt cheap.

While I can agree with the dislike of the gradients, I think it shouldn't be entirely done away with. No texture and gradient looks worse than cleverly disguised gradient and texture. The trick is to make these look "flat" enough that people actually believe that it is a solid color. But compare it with a solid color and it draws the eye a lot more.

Tl;DR tone down the gradients, not remove them completely.

While we're on the subject of the UI windows, could you please separate the two pin functionalities? For almost all of my windows i want them to be locked so i don't accidentally move them around when rotating the camera for example, but most of them i don't want transparent.

I really like it. For me, focusing on a screen where everything looks the same is hard, so the new UI is really good.

Just needs some polishing, like not making context menu transparent or the selected items window (warp/align.. etc.) one always transparent and I can't wait for it to hit TQ.