Quote:
Originally Posted by Solecismic
I appreciate your thoughts. I would like to focus, rather than on what you'd like to see in the game (which is also important, but more useful years down the road), on what it is that you don't like about the existing interface.
A lot of reviews begin, "while the interface is the worst thing I've seen since Ford tried to market the Edsel..."
And then it's forgotten. Like FOF is supposed to have the worst interface in gaming history. Now I'd go with that if I could market it, but that approach only works for the Kardashians.
So what do you mean, specifically, when you say that FOF has a horrible interface?
|
It's really cool that you asked this. I don't think the UI is horrible overall, in fact in some areas it's quite impressive to me, but it does have a few not-so-great fun impediments scattered around here and there IMHO. Mostly just little annoyances:
- First of all, thank you for making FOF 8 choose a default League ID. That was on my list of "horrible" UI features in FOF 7. Ideally the game would choose its own ID internally and let players choose a league name instead (with spaces allowed, no unreasonable length/character constraints), but the change in FOF 8 is definitely an improvement.
- Single-click on tables to both select an object and open its info screen is not intuitive, and worse, this behavior is not consistently applied across the entire UI in FOF, so you never know what to expect when clicking a table item. Most users will expect a single-click to select a table object, and double-click or right-click to a popup menu for further actions on the selection. Granted it's one more click, but it's also consistent with the vast majority of other tables your users are likely to have interacted with.
- It's great that the table columns are sortable by clicking the headers, but most sortable tables will toggle ascending/descending with subsequent clicks. I often wish FOF tables would do that too.
- Something on-screen that describes all table column headers is badly needed. Tooltips, or maybe right-click the headers for a small popup description that disappears when the mouse moves away. Just something that helps us quickly know what un-obvious acronyms like "KRBO" means without having to dig open the manual or Google it.
- Every screen has a Close Window button somewhere, but where's the close "X" button in the upper corner? Practically everyone I've shown this game to has almost immediately clicked the little football in the upper-right trying to close a screen. After years of using Windows, Mac, and Linux, people have come to expect most screens to be closeable from one of the upper corners.
- Wherever possible/applicable, closing screens should re-focus to the previous screen so the mouse wheel will still scroll tables etc. without having to re-click it. A good example of that workflow is scrolling through the roster, checking a player's info or negotiating a new contract, closing the player's info screen, then scrolling through the roster again. The need to re-select the table every time is tedious and annoying over time. Although I know component focus management in Windows can also be quite disappointing, so I'd say this wouldn't be so bad if clicking the table to focus on it didn't also open the player's info screen, which steals focus from the table again.
- Draft Speed and Roster Speed dropdowns don't remember their previous selections.
- If a contract proposal is invalid (typo, trying to guess the league min for his exp. level, etc.), then ALL the salary text fields are reverted back to the player's original desired offer. Please make it stop doing this, it's not nice at all.
- Thank you for adding a large display in FOF 8 of my team's record that I can watch while the season is simulating. This is better than the little table in FOF 7, although I'd still like to see my team's standing compared with others in the division. I used to like watching my team's position move up/down as the season went. Unfortunately, FOF 8 usually freezes at around mid-season on my system (smooth updates prior to that), then wakes up after a few seconds and snaps immediately to the post season. It lowers the fun value of this new W/L display for me.
- Entering the Pre-Season stage should automatically open the Simulation Window. It's not friendly to new players that the game expects something but doesn't ask for it until the right button is clicked.
- Entering the Free Agency stage should automatically open the team's roster and clearly list any RFAs to be considered for new contracts. It's not friendly to new players for the game to assume they know this needs to be done in the 1st stage or else they might lose players, nor to make users manually open the roster and sort on Contract years to see the RFAs that need attention.
- At the end of a season, probably the most interesting stats for the player are their team's rankings compared to all other teams in the categories of pass yards gained/allowed, rush yards gained/allowed, and points gained/allowed. These numbers provide an invaluable macro barometer for determining where the off-season roster focus should be, but they are difficult to find and almost equally as difficult to read once you do find them because they're hiding among about 100 other stats on the Team Summary screen. FOF 8 took this in the right direction; I LOVE the new "Nth Rushing Nth Passing" display. Please separate these out between offense/defense? In any event, a simple-yet-thorough, at-a-glance overview of how our team did or is doing compared to rest of the league (besides just our W/L record) was/is still very much needed.
Hopefully that's more or less the kind of stuff you were looking for. I know you were trying to steer this topic away from new feature requests, but I think in some cases the lack of features (not automatically showing some screens, new/better way of displaying key stats) are part of the UI's core criticism, so I judiciously included a couple of those. I'm a UI developer by trade, so I know some of the challenges and I appreciate/respect the thought and hard work you've clearly put into it. Cheers!