As much as people have debated to death over that horrid horizontal-scrolling Apple hipster art deco font atrocity skills foldout, we still know relatively little about the rest of the menus and I was curious to see if anybody had any interesting ideas for them. My biggest concern is the inventory - now that we're apparently going to be able to handle the items in 3D, is that the end of inventory icons? Is the inventory going to be some big obnoxious grid of tiny, un anti-aliased models floating on a black screen? There's apparently been some mention of being able to quickly compare selected items to those of what you currently have equipped, probably a side-by-side match-up of their statistics, like Civilization V's combat outlook. If you're unfamiliar with it, image below:

http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/appletell/civ5-combat-640x480.jpg

That could be useful, to say the least. Virtually every TES game was a pain in how you had to dig through your inventory to get from one item to another, equip (Arena), click (Daggerfall), or hover over (MW/OB) to look at its attributes and then scroll all the way over to the other one.

We haven't heard any information about the journal in Skyrim, either. Now that we have Radiant Story and NPCs giving directions again, it'd be nice if you could copy lines of dialog into a "notes" section like in Daggerfall. I'd much prefer that, anyway, over the nagging pop-ups written in first person: "Bob the Imperial told me the cave is west of here. I should go west of here...wherever that was when I first got the quest."

The UI is an important feature for me. There is so much time spent going in and out of the menu that a bad interface can ruin game play. Even though the MW UI was nothing special the OB UI was horrible compared back to MW (on xbox). The skills trees they showed us so far looks like flashy crap. The colors were all wrong and the side scrolling to get between 18 skills...I hope they don't saddle us with a monstrosity like that...

I'm going to go against the grain and say, I don't mind the oblivion UI too much. You get used to it and it beats the crap out of Final Fantasy's. (Last I played was #10, but they were all convoluted.)

One thing I'd really like is the ability to construct or edit my own journal. The Journal entry's in Oblivion did annoy me in their vague directions. If you're going to give me some information, give it to me. Don't hint and crap and the give me a red marker to run to like a [censored] dog chasing a stick.

I'm sure we'll be given inventory icons with the option of viewing them in 3D, probably by clicking or selecting the item's icon, and then we'll have a side window showing us what our character looks like wearing it much like what we had before in Oblivion. The 3D window could also give a detailed description of that item and it's attributes, the basic info could be seen by hovering over the icon though.

Reminds me of http://lparchive.org/Zork-Grand-Inquisitor/Update%206/38-5inventory_firsttotem.jpg, which let you view items close up on the board in the corner with the monocle. Having it on the board let you interact with it, and put it together with other items. Maybe the 3D window will be like this by letting us interact with the item, repairing it, opening a book or letter, putting things together, etc.

I totally agree about the journal. It could be a great tool.

I had no problem with Oblivion's UI, I found it easy to find my stuff, I just used the horizontal tabs. As for Morrowinds UI, the atrocious and repellent abhorrence... Gah!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us9ox2pMWzw

I actually didn't mind the look of the new skills menu, at first i was a bit skeptical however after closer inspection and after getting used to it i think it will be quite nice and i like that its different from the normal list feel that you so often get in rpgs, im also very interested to see the new inventory interface and even more eager to see the Map so far it sounds awesome.