UI / UX Feedback Megathread

[The Aziz]

6 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I love how the pixelated style looks at native resolution

While "native" is not the most commonly used one according to https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam. 

[Casellina X]

Couple more things to point out:

Spoiler

There's no sorting capability in the Tracking Station and there seems to be little rhyme or reason to how the list is populated. I don't think Kerbals should be referred to as Vessels - or at least outwardly so, and the should probably have their own icon. A space helmet or Kerbal head silhouette.

Spoiler

Maybe a good QOL feature would be recoloring of icons and/or orbit lines. Also maybe make the gradient more pronounced to indicate directionality.

Spoiler

Another useful piece of information might be the atmosphere height. By this point we all know to make it above 70km at Kerbin, but what is it for Duna? Eve? For CBs with no atmosphere, replace it with the minimum height to be able to maintain orbit. That can be really helpful for planning.

Spoiler

Maybe for consistency, move the favorite star to where the asterisk is so that it doesn't move on mouseover. And it seems like you should be able to set the favorite from mouseover, but you can't.

There should be default zoom levels when setting focus to different CBs. Being zoomed into something like Eeloo, then switching to Jool and being clipped inside is a little jarring, then another switch to Duna and having to break out your magnifying glass… a little too much adjustment needed by the user.

Spoiler

This button doesn't work (for Kerbol), but it does in the Information Panel on the right.

Spoiler

Inclination, AP, PE, those sorts of things should be in the panel as well.

Spoiler

The circumference of Kerbol can't be 22 ly, surely that's the SOI circumference? I zoomed out just to be sure and it's a long way before that appears, so that must be a mistake. I'm curious what this will look like when another system is available.

Spoiler

Another QOL suggestion is to have the count of each respective grouping.

Another note about the Training Center, if a user sets CC for one video, it should apply globally for the rest.

Fine grained control when zooming in the map view would be handy. The step is sometimes too large when trying to zoom into AP/PE to set a maneuver node.

Spoiler

Icon scaling seems to go crazy depending on what you're focused on. In this picture Kerbin has the focus and as you can see, the craft Icon is unnecessarily large.

Spoiler

To call out window hierarchy again. Paige says to open the parts manager and then obscures it.

Spoiler

Should launch clamps be auto-recovered?

[HebaruSan]

[Starwaster]

I'd like to be able to bind zoom and translating the camera up and down in the VAB. Specifically I want to be able to bind the latter to the mouse wheel the way it was in KSP1. 

(not asking for the current setup to change, just for the ability for the player to be able to change it)

[Poppa Wheelie]

In map view, it's very difficult to manipulate the map when looking directly down at the north pole of the target body.  All mouse movements from this perspective cause far too much movement.  We need the ability to make very small scale movements from this view, just as we can when looking directly at the equator of the body.

[Spicat]

8 minutes ago, Poppa Wheelie said:

In map view, it's very difficult to manipulate the map when looking directly down at the north pole of the target body.  All mouse movements from this perspective cause far too much movement.  We need the ability to make very small scale movements from this view, just as we can when looking directly at the equator of the body.

This is a bug that I find really annoying, you can upvote it here:

 

[Lach_01298]

On 12/2/2023 at 7:57 AM, The Aziz said:

  Hide contents

Same with VAB. Nice, clean modern design, smooth iconography, perfect for a space age game

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You even had the same or very similar icons in the interface in the last 4 years, but decided to pixelify them. Shame.

Yeah that's sort of astonishing how they had a much better UI (clearer icons, more compact nav ball, etc) then decided to get rid of it for the pixel ascetic. Not sure why they thought the current UI design and ascetic was an improvement.

[Turbo Ben]

Upfront, I haven't played since 0.1.2, so some of my thoughts may be out of date.

1. The main reason I haven't played since 0.1.2 is because my joystick stopped working in 0.1.3. I've played KSP with a joystick so much that I can't face going back to the keyboard for flight controls. I know it wasn't supposed to work before 0.1.3, but for pitch and roll it did.

2. The pixelated fonts and UI graphics. I got a 55" 4K OLED, mainly for KSP. Even so I still find the pixelated fonts and graphics cluttered and unclear.

3. The speed and altitude tapes seem redundant to me and take up too much space for the little that they add. Just having a numerical readout is fine.

4. There are two seperate places for SAS controls. Some in a box at the bottom and some in the circular display to the right of the navball. In the middle of the circular display is the graphic showing the orientation of your vessel. I've never used this graphic, the navball has all the info I need. I'd say remove it and have all the SAS controls in one place.

5. We need a way to lock the navball so it doesn't automaticly change between orbital and surface modes. Sometimes the switch is useful, other times it ends a mission. A small switch on the navball somewhere to enable/disable the auto mode switching would be welcome.

6. I haven't tried it yet, but the navball changing colour at different altitudes seems like it would be a pain. I don't want the appearance of my instruments changing mid flight. It seems like it would be an unnecessary distraction.

7. Not sure if it's been fixed but the part and resource managers were awful to use, espescially when transferring fuel between multiple tanks. Sometimes it would take several clicks to select a tank, sometimes selecting a tank would randomly deselect other tanks.

8. Seperate controls for wheel throttle. I have a paddle on my throttle that works perfectly for forward and reverse.

That's all that comes to mind for now. Hoping for HOTAS support soon so I can give For Science! a try when it releases.

[Spicat]

I tried to change the texture to the smooth font (and bold). It's not perfectly done (especially the alignment) but it gives an idea:

I maintain that for text (and icons) that are small like that, they should take the smooth font, for big ones the pixelated font is alright.

Edited December 10, 2023 by Spicat

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Spicat said:

I tried to change the texture to the smooth font (and bold). It's not perfectly done (especially the alignment) but it gives an idea:

I maintain that for text (and icons) that are small like that, they should take the smooth font, for big ones the pixelated font is alright.

I think it's a bad idea to just patch more inconsistencies in, as opposed to creating a new UI that isn't riddled with fundamental rendering issues.

[Spicat]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

I think it's a bad idea to just patch more inconsistencies in, as opposed to creating a new UI that isn't riddled with fundamental rendering issues.

It's not really inconsistent, there is a bunch of numbers that uses the smooth font.

In fact, all the numbers around the navball are smooth, only the navball isn't.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Spicat said:

It's not really inconsistent, there is a bunch of numbers that uses the smooth font.

Those numbers clash with the heavily-aliased UI elements which don't scale to any other aspect ratio.

1 minute ago, Spicat said:

In fact, all the numbers around the navball are smooth, only the navball isn't.

In other words, it's inconsistent.

[mcwaffles2003]

I'll wait until the next patch comes out to give my ideas in detail. Im hoping to see, though doubting I will, a science overlay from the tracking station/map view. Basically a toggle in that view between ship mode and science mode

[AlanTalo]

The main problem I am having with the ui is the font used is hard to read in certain situations, especially when trying to differentiate between an 8 and a 0 on the time warp and maneuver countdown interface.

I have posted about this in separate thread, in which I was pointed toward this one. Thought I might link to it in hopes of it making it to the right hands.

 

[mattihase]

I will say in the map view the pixelated vessel icons kinda remind me of back when I made one of my earliest unity games and it was in a "pixel art" style but it was before they added the pixel perfect camera so the whole world was made out of pixel art but because it was moving around and rotating all smooth and some stuff was scaled wrong, it looked jarringly bad, and anyway yeah "giant pixel art capsule awkwardly scaled on the screen" is reminding me of that and how irritated I was with not being able to get that looking good.

On the other hand it does remind me of old flash animations and webcomics so that's kind of nostalgically good, but still I think in this context it do kinda just look bad.

 

[mattihase]

It's always kinda bugged me that the wing edit box always seems to show up exactly  under the part manager and always behind it so if part manager is open I can never see it when it first pops up.

[mattihase]

Also one thing I am curious about from any polyglots here is what kind of font does the game use for non latin alphabets? I don't currently have it installed to make way for the 0.2 zip file to be downloaded and unzipped (I don't have a lot of spare hard drive space), but I can see the game supports Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese so are they also using pixel fonts for the various alphabets those languages use?

[18Watt]

Requesting the ability to use warp with Ion engines.  I believe a mechanic for making low-thrust engines more useable is planned sooner or later.  Sooner would be better.  I may be missing something- perhaps there is already a way to engage physics warp in space that I just haven't figured out yet.

[munix]

I have put together a reference file with most of the various styles of UI controls in the game, hopefully making obvious some of the biggest inconsistencies in style: https://www.figma.com/file/E3sOOr56TNFCL9eEjGBQjA/KSP2-UI-Reference.

For example, there are ~30 different styles of buttons in the game. Of course, I'm not saying that there should be only one single style for each type of controls, but as it is now, the UI is a bit of an incoherent mess.

Also, it shows that it is indeed possible to have style consistency across different scenes - looking at the sliders. One is from the Settings page; one is from the VAB. Both views very different, but they have a common style for this one type of control. This is what I'd like to see more of across the whole game.

Edited December 17, 2023 by munix

[Meecrob]

On 12/2/2023 at 4:28 PM, HebaruSan said:

Frankly, so many things are wrong with the current UI that I doubt that a one-fix-at-a-time approach can be successful. A root cause analysis of what went wrong is needed to determine how to move forward. Is there no UI/UX designer in-house? Hire one, pronto! Is there one but their advice was ignored or bypassed? Give them more authority within the team, such as mandatory reviews and sign-offs before feature branches get merged. Is there one and their advice was heeded but poor? Replace them (carefully!). It's essential that interfaces be designed competently before they reach the point of end users giving feedback, because at that point you're going to get an overwhelming mass of bullet points as users pick the dozen nits that irked them individually (see above and below!).

I agree 100% and I think most gripes related to the Flight Interface can be eliminated by aiming to make a simulation-style interface based on real-world solutions, then dumb it down for playability. As it stands right now, it looks like you guys watched some sci-fi movie and copied a "cockpit" that was designed to look like flashy advanced technology to laypeople who just want to watch a space-sitcom.

Remember: Real engineers in real life already figured out how to display the relevant information. You guys are already behind schedule. Just take the R&D in the public domain and stop trying to re-invent the wheel.

Edit: And above else, do not pander to the lowest common denominator. The reason people like this (hopefully) franchise is that it is complex and challenging. Uplift the bottom end of your market to engage at KSP's level, do not ever dumb down KSP.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Meecrob

[The Aziz]

Coming in with first kick.

I'm sitting at very heatlhy and comfortable 60cm from the  23" 1080p screen. Whatever is in the extended staging info is UNREADABLE at this size. You've done it again.
(congrats on making the windows more conistent though)

[Poodmund]

The UI is probably the main gripe I have with KSP2 as of the v0.2.0 release...

1.

And that is mainly down to the font choice in some areas. I would like to say that the main, general font that is used throughout the game is REALLY nice, however, the pixel-y, console style font is very hard to parse and I find it hard to read. There are also some areas where some of the text is being displayed too small at a reasonable resolution. I would suggest that a minimum total pixel height be ratified by the UI team to ensure that text cannot be displayed too small on the screen (stage dV panels in the VAB) and also the option to toggle to replace all instances of the pixel-y, console style font to be replaced by the default font used elsewhere. 

To be explicit, offer a toggle to replace all instances of the fonts 'SB Liquid' and 'SB Websnap' with 'Realtime Rounded', would be my suggestion here.

2.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread... SI units matter... and case matters for SI units. To add to the issues raised in this thread: 

I have annotated this image to supplement the posts in the above thread.

In addition, the unit case on the navball speed and altimeter are incorrect.

Hopefully by collating all the posts about these issues it can be cleared up.

3.

Also... it would be FANTASTIC if when you mouse-overed a data value, it presented the raw base value as a tool tip. For example, hovering over Kerbin's SMA presented a tooltip of 13,599,840,256m.

4.

Lastly, there are areas in the UI textures that feature dithered (pixel checkerboard) backgrounds. I presume this was done as a stylistic choice but this adds to the difficulty when reading the UI. It would be preferable, to me, if these dithered areas were instead, either, solid colour or represented as a gradient.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Poodmund

[Tallenn]

My biggest problem with the UI: No maneuver gizmo. In KSP 1, I only made the grossest changes to a maneuver node by dragging the icons on the node itself. It's just too easy to grab the wrong icon, and minute changes are near impossible. I always used to just use the node icons to get the node "somewhat close", then fine tune it with the maneuver gizmo. This is especially critical when setting up maneuvers for rendezvous. 

[tstein]

20 hours ago, Poodmund said:

 

REgarding that image, what hurts my brain is k/m/s that is not km per second that is  kelvin per meter per second. Please use correct   nomenclature. km/s    the  / means DIVIDED and K multiples meters in km.

[Sea_Kerman]

On the topic of maneuvers, having the delta-v readout on the maneuver count down would be quite helpful.