How Skyrim's UI is fundamentally flawed, Not just for PC, but in general Options

[Thomas Kaira]

At this point, the number one complaint for Skyrim on the PC boards (besides crashes) is the User Interface. A fair deal of the problems can be attributed to bad porting, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. However, after taking a look around at some of the constructive criticism I've seen on the UI, I have concluded that the problems stemming from it are not entirely from bad porting, but from straight-up bad design.

What we get in Skyrim is a sorry, sorry excuse for a UI that is trying (very badly) to pretend it's a super-slick Apple-esque inspired design. Trouble is, the guys who were trying so hard to copy Apple's visuals forgot one very important thing: ease of use comes first. Here is where things went horribly wrong:

- Very little information displayed on screen at once. Take the inventory, for instance. Instead of giving us quick info on the fifteen or twenty items that are currently displayed in the list, we only see one. The rest of the space is taken up by a "OHH EMM GEE LOOKIE WHAT WE CAN DO!!!" 3D model of the item in question. I have never seen such a waste of space in any UI ever before. Half the screen for one item? Seriously? Same goes for Spells.

- Scrolling required where none is needed. The category filters and item lists for Inventory and Spells are primarily to blame here, but the Skills menu commits the same crime, too. Factoring in every sub-category available for the inventory and spells lists (weapons, apparel, destruction, restoration, etc.), no scrolling should even be needed, it's not even necessary to downsize the text. So why do we have to? Needlessly hiding information from the user is VERY sloppy design. Another problem here is that for inexplicable reasons, Bethesda decided to have the lists track the selection arrow instead of the other way around. The selection arrow remains fixed in the center of the lists, so that's where the lists' origin point is. And on first opening that particular list, you will notice that half of the space allocated for it is completely empty. It's going to use that space anyways, guys, why not keep it populated? As for the skills, again, you need to scroll in order to check your progression and current rank outside of the few displayed on screen at once. There's plenty of space available up top, why not just put that info there?

- The Radial menu is completely pointless. For the console, in order to open the menus, you must first go through this compass display that serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. You press the Menu button to bring up the compass, use the thumbstick to select which menu you wish to enter, and then press your action button. Three actions before the menus actually display anything useful. At least Oblivion gave you information the moment you entered the menus, you didn't have to go through Skyrim's massive-waste-of-time compass display. At least on PC you can skip that thing. But why should PC be able to skip it when consoles can't? How about we get rid of the middleman entirely and just map the menu access controls to the D-Pad? Sure, it would mean losing the quick-selects, but since consoles only got two of those, its a sacrifice that can be made. Now, you use the D-Pad to open your inventory and map and such, and your Favorites are accessed by pressing X. This shaves three unneeded actions off actually getting to the actual meat of the UI while losing none of the original functionality aside from two quick-slots that are not needed anyways (that is WAY not enough for them to be useful). Or how about actually giving some useful tool-tipped information in the compass menu? Inventory could display the stats of weapons and armor you currently have equipped, spells would do the same for equipped magic and powers/shouts. Skills would show you the rank and progression progress of your six highest skills and level progress (moving it from the bottom, about the only real info that was actually displayed on the compass menu), and map would tell you what region you are currently in as well as the current objectives for your selected quests and the clock (also present now, one of only two pieces of information available on this menu as-is). You know, give that menu a reason to exist by making it into a quick-reference interface as well as a gateway middleman.

- Navigating your perks is difficult. Scrolling forward through the stars is okay, but there is one critical flaw here I really can't believe Bethesda missed: you need to scroll backwards blind. The only thing worse than scrolling without reason is scrolling when you can't even see where you are trying to go. 3D menus like this simply cannot have a fixed camera angle.

- No at-a-glance details whatsoever in your inventory and spells lists. If you want to know an item's value, or how much damage a weapon does, or whether or not the item is stolen, you must scroll all the way through your item list until you get to that specific item. This is a direct symptom of the half-a-screen for one item problem, so much space is being wasted being in-your-face that there isn't any room for any sort of quick-references. Oblivion's default UI showed you the details of up to five items at a time. Granted, it wasn't much, but if you advertize reducing the amount of information provided by your interface as a feature of your game, you probably have your priorities in the wrong place. Personally, when I'm paging through a menu, I don't care about "viewing objects in high detail," I would prefer to view my menus in high detail, with lots of good information being communicated to you at one time.

- Speaking of the high-detail object viewing, why give us the ability to zoom in on the object, but then leave it at the same size and detail level when we are not interested in the high-detail view? That makes the whole zoom feature pretty pointless, and further reinforces how much good space is being wasted trying to
make you oooh and aaah.

There are plenty more issues on PC (mostly due to shoddy porting), but these are universal; and are genuine flaws, not bugs. Those are all novice mistakes committed because Bethesda put making things look pretty before analyzing the ease of use and fluidity. Apple-inspired? Sure.... There are so many basic flaws that what this UI needs is not an optimizing, not even an overhaul; it needs to be rebuilt from scratch. And Bethesda really needs to read "UI Design for Dummies," because the very basics of this one are so, so wrong.

This is my one major complaint for this game. I abhor this dysfunctional interface that we received. Everything listed above was an amateur mistake on Bethesda's part, stuff so obvious once pointed out you wonder how they didn't notice it during development. And the answer for that is really quite simple: Bethesda, yet again, was trying so hard to impress us with shiny graphics that they didn't give any good thought to the core design the graphics were being built on. The same mistake was made in Oblivion, where Bethesda tried so hard to wow us with procedural foliage, distant visuals, and Radiant AI that the game that was being built to house them suffered for it. I so want for Bethesda to learn from their mistakes, but this seems to be the one they just keep on making.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Nov 24 2011, 06:08 AM