[MUD-Dev] UI Design in MMOs

[Derek Licciardi]

This is somewhat of a rant but it's an issue that I was hoping would
be resolved by the newer games that largely hasn't been resolved at
all.  Having spent a majority of my career in business application
design and not games, the quality of the user interface has always
been something that was very high up on the list of requirements for
any software application that I was building.  How come this is not
the case with MMOs?  Even the latest crop of them has major UI
problems that a basic UI design book would tell you not to do, yet
there they are.  I'm going to slam the WoW UI here for a minute
because it needs pointing out, but every game out there has its own
issues.

In WoW, it seems like they went after their Diablo II crowd with an
interface derived straight from that game.  Nothing is movable,
resizable or customizable.  In an MMO where my play style is
different from yours, you should be able to get comfortable. (group
vs. solo, pet vs. no pet, crafting.)  Instead, you are forced to
play the game the way the developers think is best.  Even the
dynamic windows are not movable which will be nothing but
frustration for crafters that need multiple bags open and other
dialogs.

The biggest issue in WoW reminds me of the first EQ interface, lack
of consistency.  Let's see, right click is the primary activity on
an object.  Uh NO.  Everyone from Mac to Linux to Windows has been
trained that left click or left double click is the primary action
and right click brings up a context sensitive menu. (EQ2 and SWG
seem to have figured this out for the most part) Why abandon that
idea?  It makes zero sense at this point in the software industry.
Scrollbars for windows are placed on the left hand side of the
window.  Wrong again.  Every scrollbar you see in the big three OSes
are right side scroll bars.  Again why abandon this familiarity.
There's more.  The skill information dialog has icon based tabs on
the top right hand corner of the window while the character
information dialog has worded tabs along the bottom edge of the
window.  The item information dialog comes up in a fixed location on
the right hand bottom corner of the screen and your inventory is on
the left hand bottom corner but for some strange reason they figured
out hovering stat windows for various other dialogs in the game.  I
simply do not get it and one would think that major development
houses would have a clue about this sort of stuff.  Learning from
history seems to be beyond some developers these days.  While I'm
typically a,
we-need-to-throw-the-whole-design-formula-out-the-window kind of
guy, in the area of UI design, I'm firmly in the camp of taking
advantage of what the user already is comfortable with.  After all,
M$ and company have spent millions of dollars figuring out how
people use computers and they generally have got it right.  Sure,
tweak the UI but don't abandon its general principles in favor of
something has no user testing.

Enough of the rant; I've made my point.  Let's hope that the next
generation of games doesn't botch the UI as badly as WoW did.  Are
there any WoW developers on this list?  If so, please enlighten us
on the decision process that went into your UI design.  I'd be
interested in knowing how much attention was paid to it during the
development cycle.  How about the other studios?  Do you typically
pay attention to the user interface for your game or is game-play
(of which I'd argue UI is part of but alas) and graphics all that
matters?

Derek
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