UI is a mess

[Mackensen]

I used to play Endless Legend, and the UI in that game was pretty good.
All the necessary information was readily available. The UI was clean, simple and direct.
But the UI in Humankind is a mess. Most information is hidden. Menus are too big and clunky and have too much flare.
It's really hard to play a strategy game when the UI is bad.
Are there any plans to fix this and improve the UI?

[Bedoune]

I find Humankind's UI way more noob-friendly than EL's.
I'd say it's all subjective in the end, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it needs to be fixed :)

[Mackensen]

The UI is not friendlier to new players.
Quite the opposite. Aside from the tool tips, it's pretty bad.
It really needs a full revamp.

[Bedoune]

Yep, just what I said, totally subjective :)

[slcowden]

I don't think I have ever played a game on Steam where there wasn't someone saying those exact words "UI is a mess"

[Mich-666]

I have to agree, still waiting for them to fix the UI before buying. Have tried demo and I couldn't work effectively with this UI. Whole thing needs some rework or at least better placing. Basically, most of the time, UI elements are placed where you wouldn't expect them to be.

Some feedback, just from top of my head.

- Unit info takes good third of the space on the right side of the screen. I see no reason for it to be this big and I don't understand why it needs to appear everytime I select the unit. Something smaller, at the bottom of the screen would be a lot better.
- Location of tile info is illogically placed on the bottom left where unit info should be. It's not that important to be at the most exposed position. Also, fade in/out effect needs to go, the effect may look good but I would prefer if it appear right away as I move the mouse, searching for the best yield around.
- yield icons are too small and hard to read, the fact that they are tilted with terrain doesn't help either. Their readability suffers a lot.
- There needs to be some slider to change the speed of the screen movement when moving the mouse to border of the screen. Current speed is too slow.
- This may sound strange but the viewing angle of terrain when zooming it is kinda off. I don't know how to decribe this well but the camera angle you look at the terrain need to be fixed.

It's kinda weird they made it so user-unfriendly, considering both Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 have on of the best UIs in 4x games. Basically, if they reordered the location of all UI elements based on either of those games, it would be a lot better.

Guess I will wait until UI revamp before buying the game. The game may be great otherwise and this may look like small problem but in reality it's pretty big issue that prevent playing the game effectively. It's sad to say this but it currently makes me not want to play this game :/

[Oksennus Oliver]

How there is no minimap for a 4x strategy game in the year 2021?

[AOM]

Originally posted by Oksennus Oliver:

How there is no minimap for a 4x strategy game in the year 2021?

+1
And, again, +1.
I don't think there are enough +1's for this question.
It is ridiculous that in the year 2021 there is a 4X game that has no minimap.

[Dorok]

Originally posted by Mich-666:

- Unit info takes good third of the space on the right side of the screen. I see no reason for it to be this big and I don't understand why it needs to appear everytime I select the unit. Something smaller, at the bottom of the screen would be a lot better.
- Location of tile info is illogically placed on the bottom left where unit info should be.

Unit info? It's not one unit like in crap civ5 it's a stack merging multiple units type, you can select a unit in the stack and make various actions with this panel.

[Dorok]

For Endless Legend UI vs Humankind UI, there's in fact some shared design that are rather uncommon and not standard, and in UI it's a dangerous design decision. I don't have the list but a few I remind:
- Buttons or tabs that don't look at all like buttons or tabs, the problem is bigger for buttons, but remains valid for tabs.
- Plenty tooltips providing critical gameplay information, let say a sort of abuse of tooltips.
- Tooltips trigger zones not intuitive at all, or at least not standard at all.
- More

It's not really bad designs, it's designs that are just too uncommon. For example the tooltips abuse was complimented by some players used to the UI.

Otherwise I wonder if the comparison is fair between EL (not EL2 not played yet) and HK:
- The major difference is HK has a complex map requesting a lot of information, EL space map is plain basic in comparison.
- Another major difference is EL reduced the complexity by spreading management through various views, I don't remind clearly but there was at least, space view, system view, list of systems. HK UI at reverse is an UI design integrating everything or trying to do it. But let be clear to achieve it more or less, it dragged HK UI in multiple lack of classic consistency. But EL was suffering of the classic problem shared by many complex games with a lot of actions, a lot too many switches between different views.

After 100H of play, if not more, I did a thread on UI problems, there was like 20 points highlighted. So I can't say I fully disagree with OP. But also later I realized multiple points was wrong, after 100H I had still a learning curve for the UI. For me that's the main problem of the UI, the awful learning curve, coming from lack of consistency, too many uncommon UI designs, too many information on one screen.

After many hours of play, the UI becomes a lot better (learning curve achieved or close) and there's even many details very well done.

But at the end there's still some questionable UI designs (past the problem of learning curve). But after like 400H of play (200H with gamepass) it's very hard to list them, it became a reflex to go over the problems, and this hides them.

The too global comment in this thread are hard to comment:
- It's a mess? Well I can't see it anymore.
- Too big? Well I hate those tiny unreadable UI and the worse is HK UI suffer sometimes of thos problem so the too big, I can't validate that.
- Clunky menu? I didn't even notice any single menu.

But:
- The UI is not friendlier to new players:
=> I agree, learning curve problem.
- yield icons are too small and hard to read:
=> I agree, there's a visibility problem, not sure it's because it's too small.
- There needs to be some slider to change the speed of the screen movement when moving the mouse to border of the screen. Current speed is too slow:
=> In fact in options there's a slider, but even pushed to max speed it's ridiculously slow. Obviously a feature no tester really use to play.

For making a list of my own, annoying, I don't care, anyway I already did a long list and even if some points was wrong because of UI learning curve, I doubt any have been fixed/improved.

[Dorok]

One example of UI very bad design from a learning curve point of view, but rather fine when you know already.

The war tab:
- A ton of players don't notice it at all even after many hours of play. It just appears among some other tab, but it's discrete. When you know play this design is perfectly coherent because you don't care of it until some turns.
- Many critical information is through some toolltips, plenty player never ever discover. Too many tooltips, tooltips trigger zones not intuitive, too many critical information "hidden" into tooltips. Once you know it's handy and very functional.

That's just one example.

[Mich-666]

Originally posted by Dorok:

Unit info? It's not one unit like in crap civ5 it's a stack merging multiple units type, you can select a unit in the stack and make various actions with this panel.

Doesn't matter it's stack of multiple units, it doesn't have to take huge part of the screen either way. Waste of space.

To give comparisons:

Endless Legend UI:
https://i.imgur.com/iV3Vdnc.jpg
notifications near end turn button, unit info and actions small in left right (along with terrain info above), resource, other windows in top left and story quests top right. Pretty user-friendly.

Endless Space 2 UI:
https://i.imgur.com/wmWkSeW.jpg
notifications near end turn button, unit info/action in lower part of the screen, context info lower left, resource and other windows in top left and story quests top right. Pretty much the same as Endless Legend, very user-friendly.

Humankind UI:
https://i.imgur.com/nNfjcTA.png
On the first glace random mess of icons.
On the second glance - quest menu turned into star/era menu and swapped position with (very basic) resource window (no access to other panels there), added diplomacy shortcut for all other civs (most of the time not needed, only takes screen space where one button would be enough), unit info in the right takes almost half of the screen and stays there for most of the game if you have anything selected, research/civics/relegion/other tabs moved into bottom left side of screen (bit huge icons) and so on. Also see those empty unit posititions there that only takes space. They have notification all over the place, depending on what it is, not near the end of the turn button where it would be more logical.
Doesn't really feel that user-friendly to me.

All in all I guess you can see the difference yourself. Overall, it feels like Humankind just wastes a lot of your screen space without making the information more accessible, quite contrary, there is a lot of clicking or hovering needed to get what could be displayed more easily. At the same time the screen space is also cluttered by things that would be better off hidden as you don't need to see them all the time.

[Dorok]

Ok thanks for the snapshots, I see your point.

I will only quote from those snapshot:
- EL: a lot too tiny, that's amateurish, it feels iike indies, or at least not for my eyes. How was looking the big UI version?
- ES: Woo so ugly, I didn't remind it could look like a 90's game.

But clearly if the tiny text and graphics are great for you (EL), I understand your point of view, moreover, even if not as tiny, I also understand that you wonder why that big for ES. Could be some some tablet port.

[Mich-666]

It's not really tiny, not full res picture of course. If you played any Paradox games you would know what's "tiny". Or basically any other 4x game before Amplitude started doing their business. Also ugly or sleek, that's really subjective. I like it for example as it's clean and easy to navigate.

But that's not the point here. The point is that Humankind wastes way too many space that it would be needed. Unit info for example:

https://i.imgur.com/JwY8aA6.jpg

In reality, you really only need those red parts which could be moved to the bottom of the screen instead. Whole blue section is redundant and shouldn't be there.

[Dorok]

You analytic snapshot is totally wrong, you don't know yet the game UI.

[Coma Berenices]

In my personal ranking this developer is one of the best when it comes to UI. In Endless Space everything was right. Here however, I agree, they could do a better job.