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Topic: Usability Ware sorting

SirVer

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Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1445
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Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2010-03-20, 18:56

This thread discusses

http://wl.widelands.org/wiki/UsabilityWareSorting/


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SirVer

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Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1445
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2010-03-20, 19:00

Imho Astur has a point that the UI is the most important part of this. I suggest that we should also plan how to design the UI when all tribes are merged into one (which will happen at one point in time). A lot of the wares/workers stuff must then be handled differently.


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Astuur
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Joined: 2009-02-28, 10:08
Posts: 733
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Location: Frankfurt / Germany
Posted at: 2010-03-20, 21:06

Well well.....

My initial idea was to re-sort not only the wares, but also the professionals (farmer, miller ....)that you can reach from the inventory by pressing the button at the bottom. I thought, that maybe placing the professions along side by side with their tools and products makes both more easily recognizable.

Currently there are a lot of icons for the professions missing; i.e. they use artwork from some other profession. That makes them hard to tell apart.

That would mean of course to also change the user interface for the inventory, which is not what was intended here. because a simple resorting in the conf file wont do in this case. But giving some love to the "storage display" may not be a bad idea, because there is much to improve here IMO, for both, functionality and usability.

I call this "inventory" and not "storage", because it really is an inventory. It currently shows the numbers of all wares (and professions,(if you flip over)that you can find anywhere in your economy. That may be useful at times, but most of the time, I would much prefer to see the [u]available[/u]quantity. I define that as only those wares (and professionals), that currently are in warehouses and the headquarter, because only they are truly available. In the past I had been introducing WL to quite a few players, and many times they did not understand that (as an example) the storage showed 7 gold, but they still could not build an arena. I had to explaine many times, that their gold had disappeared in the weapon factory or armoursmithy, but was still counted. Hope that is clearer now...

Another general remark, I'd like to make: I have tried to fix some of the icons, by a quick and dirty- DIY artwork, but failed miserably. No, not with blender, because that seemed overkill for just these small 2d pictures. It is very hard to come up with something pleasing here, simply because of the size limitation. Am I really the only one who thinks that those PNGs in the menu could be a bit larger? What I have mainly tried to improve for those icons is the "recognizability". I wanted them all to be clearly unique and easy to discern. It's not hard to do that (using backround color etc.), but they easily lose their charm when you do that and get downright ugly. So what we really should go for, is more detailed display. One that would for examples let you identify details. "Ah this guy is wearing a cowboy hat -- must be the horse breeder". Or maybe if the size must be kept untouched, new pictures of "head only" (instead of showing the whole person) would be a solution... Well, more come to my mind, but I am bit in hurry now. Enough to start a discussion, I hope. I am sure others will have some nice ideas, too. And then of course we'd need some artist....


Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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