nuhrin
commented
10 years ago Interesting ideas. What's most striking to me is that this is not at all a redesign of the interface -- this is pretty much exactly the interface now -- but rather some key remappings, menu restructuring, and the thing about a different colored, full screen pandafe menu.
The next most striking thing, a lot of existing functionality is missing from that summary. Perhaps that's just due to it being a 5 minute vision, but some of your comments make me wonder if you're perhaps not aware of everything that is already there.
On the tabbed navigation and "But to access the games you play the most or the ones you play recently, it's not practical at all.":
What you propose is essentially what the L and R buttons already do, but vastly reduced. The Change View screen/menu (L) gives you switching between platform list, most played, most recent, favorites (which you propose for the tabs), but also all games and category (new in 0.3.0). It also is contextually aware based on which game you have selected. For example, if you are in the Favorites view and you change to the platform or category view, you're taken to a view for the platform/category of the game you had selected in favorites, with the same game still selected in the new view. The Change Platform/Category screen/menu (R) is a quick jump to a specific platform/category (for the "now I want to go play a nes game, or rpg" use case, which is a regular one for yours truly).
Are you proposing that all those behaviors/features be removed, or were you indeed unaware of those things?
I can certainly see the need for UX improvements to that stuff, but I wouldn't want to remove it.
On the context menus:
Again lots of missing stuff, makes me wonder if you're proposing removal or just haven't flushed everything out yet. The newly added "Manage Rom" and "Manage App" will want to be there, as will the game settings, which represents a massively underused aspect that nevertheless has a good amount of depth. Check out settings for a game using mednafen to see what I mean if you don't know. That's part of the program definition, which can be used lots more given time from me or another to set up a really program definitions.
Also, a key feature set (to me at least) is the ability to add/edit platforms and programs. Currently this is part of the Data item on the main menu, and also exposed through the context menus. Once the Platform/Program preferences feature I mentioned before gets added, this will get a bit more complex in terms of how to present to the user while still keeping all the functionality available.
A possible pattern here is seen in simple form on the Manage App menu for native platform games. You can choose "Rename" or "Change Category" to make on the fly .ovr edits, but there is also a "Edit OVR" item below them that lets you edit more fully. So we're hiding complexity with the direct convenience commands, but still exposing it more fully when desired/needed.
A simple hole poking in your platform menu illustrates another need for this pattern. If you ingore a platform, how do you undo that choice.
I'm probably jumping the gun a bit with all this from your 5 minute vision, but I definitely don't want to be removing functionality. Presumably we're looking for hiding complexity to make things more intuitive and more usable, but we need to sort out where to expose that hidden complexity when its needed and/or wanted.
OK, as mentioned on Pandora boards, the menu is not very user friendly at this stage and I'd like to suggest a simple way to tackle this.
Here's a new idea for organizing the whole screen again :+1:
the first screen you see is the platform list. Very well. No change here. But to access the games you play the most or the ones you play recently, it's not practical at all.
I suggest you transform this in 3 tabs
a) the list via platforms b) list of most recently played (=launched) games c) list of most frequently played games (or favorites)
You would only see one list at a time on screen, and use Left Shoulder or Right Shoulder to cycle from one to another.
2) IN CONTEXT MENU
First principle I would go for: the "select" button should only provide actions related to what is selected on screen.
Platform selected > options offered when hitting select:
Game selected >
3) PANDAFE RELATED SETTINGS
If there are specific Pandafe related settings, I would assign a whole different button altogether to avoid the confusion and clearly separate the menus of Pandafe with the menus related tothe other items.
a) visually separate Pandafe menu itself: make it appear in a different color background, and make it fill the screen so that we know it has nothing to do with the list at hand.
b) assign a different key, like the space bar for example. I imagine "space" is not used to search for games in the list since no game starts with space... if not, "start"
c) only include options which are purely related to Pandafe and have nothing to do with platforms / lists, roms, etc... I guess that means most of the appearance settings will go there.
There's probably more but that;s just my vision in 5 minutes time. I'm really interested to see Pandafe become a super user friendly frontend, so feel free to involve me in the project further.