General > Discussion

Menu layout

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kebman:
I study systems design, and I see a lot of things that can be done to the menu systems to make many mundane tasks a lot simpler.

First, it is only possible to equip soldiers that are assigned to vehicles (airplane).
In the army, a soldier is first equipped - then attached to a vehicle. This function should be accessible directly from the recruitment list. Also, reviewing and recruiting should be made simpler. To scroll trough all the candidates is cumbersome.

If you've got more than one base - there's no way of knowing where what was researched. This leads to the player needing to flip trough all the bases to find the right lab - which is quite annoying. It should be possible to assign research trough one global screen. This goes for a lot of other things also, btw. There are too many unintuitive sub-screens and sub-menus in the game.

Administrative encumberance should be kept to a minimum. The easiest way to do this is to eliminate sub-folders and "clicks" to get from one point and to the next to do a certain task. This is actually basic web-design, but sadly lacking in the games menu layout. I'm not saying that administrative tasks should be removed - only that the way to execute them should be changed (i.e. removing sub-menus and moving tasks to global menus).

The things I mention just scratch the surface, so this should really be looked into as it IMHO is the simplest thing to fix that also will increase the gaming experience exponentially.

The game could also benefit from adding more short-cut keys. while there are some, there is no way of knowing of many of them without carefully studying FAQ's and manuals - or resorting to Googling... I like the way this is in Adobe products. Most menu items has a short cut - and they are always marked in parenthesis next to the item in question - a thing that eliminates a lot of manual-browsing

Key word: Intuitive.
For more on the topic, read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman.

BTAxis:

--- Quote from: kebman on March 26, 2008, 05:35:37 am ---Key word: Intuitive.

--- End quote ---

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. The rest is all learned."
 - Some guy I don't remember the name of.

Honestly though, we are aware of all these issues and they WILL be addressed. It just may not happen by tomorrow.

Kildor:
kebman, you always can draw some concepts of menus, or (even better) full menus. ;-)

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