I'd like to thank EA and Bioware for making an increadible game and Natalie Funk for helping me with the prototype.There are several levels of mineral abundance for a planet. Currently we're still working on putting sound in but we've got most of the other functionality working. We started with combining the planet and the scanning feedback into a single location, changed up the input system in accordance to my last blog post and also flattened the planet to make it easier to use a mouse on. I decided to build my own prototype to illustrate the problem with the UI and did so with the help of a colleage. This could be because I was on a PC and not 10 feet away from my screen.
The result is that I (I can't generalize because I haven't ran user studies with eye tracking data) spent most of my time focusing on the scanning feedback while simply trying to feel out the location on the planet. The overall problem I found with this UI is that there are two places for a player to focus, the planet and the location of the scanner (which is important to determine where to put down probes) and the right hand side and the scanning feedback (which is important to determine how much of an element you'll get when you put down your probe). It looks like two different teams designed it: the first one did the planet, and the second the scanning feedback. This also violates standards of First Person Shooters on the PC. More a complaint about the entire game, Bioware does not allow you to fully configure the keyboard layout. Creating a beautiful mapping between the frequency of a sound and the amount that you are going to get from probing it, when this is coupled with the visual feedback on the right hand side of the screen it creates a nice multi-modal experience. One of the most brilliant things about this interface is the sound as your scanner gets closer to a resource node a sound associated with that element increases in frequency. In the area to the right where the scanning strength is displayed lines up nicely with the element names bellow so you don't have to remember which spike represents what. The user cannot move the scanner off of the planet thereby breaking it. Just about everything about the scanning system is presented to the user, they can see how many resources they have, the location of their scanner, the probes they've put down and the current scanning strength of any element.
In this one I will give a short heuristic analysis of the interface and offer up a prototype I developed with a colleage in two days.įor this analysis I will use a video found here.
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