PS2 User Interface Issues & Recommendations

[Malorn]

This post is long and contains some artsy usability discussion which many people may find uninteresting. Fair warning now that you may have to do some critical thinking to contribute here.

I'm writing this because I see usability issues in the PS2 UI we have seen thus far. Some of it appears carry-over from PS1 and others are typical issues many FPS games have, which leads me to believe that they may not be realized as issues. In order to understand the issues we must first understand some key usability concepts for FPS games.


Key FPS UI Usability Concepts

Our eyes are mostly focused on the center of the screen

To illustrate this point, please take a look at this F35 cockpit HUD.


Notice how all of the vital information for flying the aircraft is near-center to the front of the aircraft? This is important.

• It allows the pilot to keep his eyes on what he is doing and not have to glance around the cockpit to get that information.
• It opens up the rest of the sky for him to clearly see threats and objectives and keeps his vision unobstructed and allows peripheral vision to work naturally.

Driving a car and playing an FPS game are the same way. Our attention most of the time is front-and-center, and important information should be near that center point, while less important information is out of the way and not obstructive to our field of vision.


1) Important information should be near-center or close to center.

• Our eyes are most often focused on the crosshair - what we're shooting & where we are looking. If important information is not very close to the center of the screen then we waste time with our eyes shifting from the center to other places, or we simply miss the important information.
• Most games fail here badly by putting vital player status information in corners. This is also a problem I see in PS2. I elaborate more later on after the concepts.

2)Unimportant information should be far from the center of the screen.

• A corollary to important information being close to center is unimportant information should be far from center so it does not distract us. It is by-definition not urgent for us to see, so don't put it in places where urgent information should be.

Not all screen real-estate is equal

In addition to not being our central focus area, certain parts of the screen are prone to having more important information than others.

Consider this image, which shows an breakdown of a still from the GDC videos of tanks driving & in combat. I divided up the screen into several parts to illustrate that some parts contain more important information than others.



3) The horizontal band bottom 1/3 of the screen is generally low-value because it is generally less-interesting than the top 2/3

• The bottom is usually the floor/ground and not much typically happens there.
• If we care about things below us we will turn and look there, making it no longer in the bottom 1/3 of the screen.
• This part of the screen is ideal for HUD information.
• One notable exception is while flying Aircraft the situation is reversed, in this instance the top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 trade places since many important targets will appear in the bottom 1/3 while flying. This implies the optimal flight UI may be a bit different from the optimal ground-based UI.

With the above image open, take your hand and cover up the bottom band of the screen. You'll observe that even though you have 1/3 of your view obstructed you can still see everything that is important. Thus in the above image I have marked the entire bottom band as "low" importance, with the corners "very low" as they are even further from the eye.


4) The horizontal band in the middle 1/3 of the screen is high value and should be as empty as possible.

• This is where we use peripheral vision to spot targets, and targets not directly in front of us are likely to be to the left or to the right.
• This is the worst place to put "pop-up" information because it plays tricks on our peripheral vision and becomes distracting.

In the above image the middle band of the screen is the opposite of the bottom band. If you cover up the middle band of the screen you have effectively blinded yourself, not being able to see anything important going on. As such, I have labeled the middle band as all "high" importance, with the very center being "very high" as it is your eyes' default focal point.


5) The horizontal band in the TOP 1/3 of the screen should have minimal information.

• Unlike the bottom 1/3, the top 1/3 could contain air threats, enemies on higher elevation to ahead of us.
• Having this area of the screen clear enables us to easily see these targets and have clear vision.

In the above image you can take your hand and cover up the top band of the screen and still see most of the important action, but you do obstruct potentially useful information, such as if there was hostile aircraft in the skies above, or AV infantry up on the rocks and cliffside. As such I have labeled the top band as "high" with the top corners as "medium".


This forms a sort of heat map of which parts of the screen are good for certain types of information.

In the tank example, the Speed & orientation indicators for the tank, as well as the compass are in great places. They are non-obstructive and they are still close to the center of the screen where the driver does not have to look far to get that critical information.

However, in contrast other critical information like health and ammo are off in the lower-right corner, as far as they can be from easy viewing. It isn't in the absolute worst place it could be (the top corners) but it is close. Health and ammo should be represented similarly to how the speed, orientation, and compass are placed. There's some great real-estate between the speed & orientation for health, with ammo possibly just above or below it. I consider the minimap is another vital piece of information that games often shove off into a corner. It does little good over there.


Issues & Recommendations for PS2's Interface

Based on the above principles, I have the following list of issues & recommendations to improve PS2's interface. Ideally all of these UI elements should be configurable by the user but the way they re drawn like it is the inside of a helmet I get the feeling it is static and not configurable.


Issue 1: Critical information is not central to the player's view

Player/Vehicle Health is the key offender. Players should not have to shift focus to check their health, it needs to be more salient. This is absolutely critical information that needs to be visible with little or preferably no conscious effort by the player.

Ammunition and ability status is also important to keep salient, but they can be a little more toward bottom-center.

Recommendation
Move & change the player health & shield indicators to be near-center, either flanking or below the crosshair. A possible good location for it is roughly right around the line that separates the middle-center section from the bottom-center section. That puts it in a position that is central to the user's view but not particularly obstructive to what they are aiming at, or what is going on in the center of the screen. I suspect this will require changing the visual assets to be a little smaller and less detailed. Since it is being given more prominence by moving location it can be more subtle.

Ammunition and abilities are good candidates for being around the central hud area, sort of near or around the places where the Speed & Orientation information for the tank is shown.

One challenge here however is that squad xp, killstreak and other information is currently presented in the bottom-center quadrant. I believe it should be moved, either to be split to the left and right sides


Issue 2: The Minimap is important but is shoved off in the corner

Many games do this, and it is a shame that it is an genre default, but its time to correct that. The minimap is off in the corner. It's quite an eyeshift to move from center to a corner, just as straining and inconvenient as health in the opposite corner. Similar to player health a Minimap is something that often has useful and important information for players. Shoving it off in a corner is poor location for it.

Recommendations
A better place for the minimap is bottom-center, literally at the very bottom of the screen. It is still in a nice unobstructing place but it is much easier to shift the eyes down to check a map than to scan off into a corner. It's a slight eyeshift and gives the player easy access to the important information it offers.

Bottom-center has one notable interest point which is in aircraft where it may be obstructive to have a radar there. However, if the aircraft are to have actual cockpits for immersion that will obstruct part of the lower area of the screen then the radar could quite simply become part of the visible part of the cockpit. Were that the case it could fit naturally into the UI for both aircraft and infantry.


Issue 3: Less-important Information is obstructing high-value screen real-estate.
The kill-spam indicator is off to the left, which interferes with the high-value peripheral area to the left. Likewise the tank occupant indicator appears to be held over from PS1 and has similar issues. The kill-spam is the worst issue since it constantly causes pop-ups and flashes, which can distract and obstruct from entities that might be in that part of the screen.

Recommendations
If the above recommendations are done for issues 1 & 2, then that means we have new locations we can put these less-important things, which are un-obstructive - the corners!

I recommend sliding the kill-spam indicator down into the corner where the minimap is currently, and the vehicle indicator slid down in the opposite. Since the minimap, health, and status are moved more to the center these corners are freed up for that information where it is less distracting and unobstructive, but still easily accessible. Any other ancillary information that a player might need should go in that lower-right corner.


Here is an example of the current UI with elements outlined and labeled where they appear.


Issues described above are fairly easy to see in this image.


Now here is my mock-up of where I think things should go.


If you notice an important part of this mockup is that I have completely blocked out significant portions of the screen and yet you can still see everything that is going on because the parts of the screen being obstructed are less-vital. More importantly, the criticla information, like player status & the minimap is easily accessible and is a very short eye shift.

Information is distributed meaningfully. Spammy-stuff is on the bottom corners. Generally less-spammy and slightly more important information is in the upper corners. Top bar is reserved for squad list, xp gain indicators, etc. Bottom right is for any sort of miscellaneous information, such as the information that currently pops up at the bottom about your kill. I think achievements and such could also go over there.

[Skitrel]

Agree, agree, agree, agree. Though you already know that.

In addition to the points on tanks, here's how Battlefield does it:



Notice how it comes up from the bottom, not the side, not destroying the screen real estate.

Also, I think this image will be of use to the guys doing UI at SOE. It was a mockup for repairing the many, many problems with BF3's UI. The main issues being that it was crap.

Not that I'm saying the UI in Planetside was bad, it looked very good in the GDC footage, however going over something like this may bring up ideas or point to possible changes and optimisation that might be good for Planetside.

[Shogun]

malorn, this is a nice analysis you did there!

and i agree on all points.

in other games i have a lot of problems with vital information that is displayed too far off the normal focus. not only in fps games. i guess the gamedevs didn´t notice that the screens are getting bigger and bigger and therefore information at the corners are going too far away.
your ideas what to put where are very good.

still the best solution would be a customisable ui where we can switch to ui-editor mode and drag and drop every part of the ui.
because i can already hear the kiddys complain, who are just used to this established configuration. and some would consider different things as vital information.

for me the xp spam, achivements, killsprees and most other popup stuff is totally unimportant. to a lot of kiddys the whole game will just be about achivements and xp, so maybe they want it in their face all the time like in typical arena shooters.

i like to customise my ui, because for me some special infos are vital that may not be of high interest to others. like in ps1 i always had the engineer deployables list open to be able to check on my deployed stuff at a glance and have an alarm system this way. when i CEd an empty base and went on for the next base, idropping counts on my mines or spittys would mean the empty base is being sneaked on.
the complexity of planetside makes it next to impossible to create a ui with fixed positions, that everybody will love.


so maybe give 2 possible standard configurations like the current one and the one suggested in this OP and give an edit mode where we can shuffel the elements around to our liking

[Malorn]

I hear ya on the other games. WoW was a terrible offender, putting the player & target in the upper left, such a terrible place for it. Star Wars TOR took a step away from that paradigm and their default UI was way better than WoW's default UI. I'm hoping PS2 can do the same for FPS games and step away from the traditional poor usability.

A strong theme of PS2 is customization, so it would be a shame if UI customization was not included. The only reason I think it might not be is that the UI elements look like they are tailored for specific parts of the screen. The HUD elements sort of look as if you are looking through a helmet and its being displayed on there and have a slight angle to them, as seen in the minimap and player status and the object in the upper right. Maybe that's something they can actually scale as you move around. If so that would be quite good.

[sylphaen]

Originally Posted by Malorn

WoW was a terrible offender
[...]

A strong theme of PS2 is customization, so it would be a shame if UI customization was not included.

WoW UI could be quite nice after customization.

Customizable UI is very very good ! Cesar, we count on you !!!

[Malorn]

Customization is a good thing for the little numbers that pop up on the screen (I labeled them as "distraction" in the picture above). Stuff like that should be toggles in the UI so we can reduce clutter.

[waldizzo]

Good points. I just want the ability for the player to be able to move or disable any UI elements. Including the +23423 YOU WIN element.

[Duddy]

I think you make some very good points as per usual, Malorn.

I too would be disappointed if we weren't given some control how the UI is arranged.

Not advocating that we are able to design custom UI pieces (though some might like that), but certainly different people will have different preferences.

[MooK]

I find the xp bonuses, killspam and other spammy stuff to also be way too distracting. If they have to be there, they should be squirrel away on a chat tab, maybe like "System" or something. Any distraction increases difficulty in response. Therefore, I think the minimap should also be squirreled away to the corner, because it changes so often (at least in PS1,) that it could be a major distraction to what's going on.

[duck]

Malorn, like always your threads are gold and I hope the devs really consider your ideas.

[Valcron]

I like Malorn and his ideas, they're pretty good. I just wonder if this guy has a job because he posts quite a bit

[Lokster]

Awesome post Malorn. I agree with everything. These points become even more important with bigger monitors. Making elements pushed to the far bottom corners even more of a taxing eye strain to view.

PS2 needs to allow for customization. Not reskinned or additional UI elements, but simply the option to move each element, choose which ones to display and set transparencies.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Lokster

These points become even more important with bigger monitors. Making elements pushed to the far bottom corners even more of a taxing eye strain to view.

Absolutely it does. If you look at my mockup, the distance difference between having the status under the crosshair area and in a corner is approximately a factor of 3 (eye needs to move 3 times further to see the data in the corner than just under)

And if it's just under the crosshair and the visual representation made a little more subtle then you shouldn't even need to shift focus and can easily see health and shield at all times using peripheral vision or at most very slight eye adjustments.

Same thing with the minimap, it is 2.5-3x closer to the focal point by being bottom-center than in a corner.

The bigger the monitor & the higher the resolution, the larger the difference becomes.

[MrBloodworth]

Is this where I ask that the Cont/tactical map be able to be placed on a second screen?

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by MrBloodworth

Is this where I ask that the Cont/tactical map be able to be placed on a second screen?

If they send out feeds of the data to web services you could probably have a continent or tactical map open on a web browser on a second monitor all the time.

That's one really cool thing about them sending out that data.