Bad Interface Design

Post » Tue Mar 01, 2016 8:24 am

The first time I quit is because I was trying to figure out a symbol which immediately brought up a dialogue to evict rather than send a dweller into the wasteland. Upon seeing the dialogue I panicked and instinctively selected where the default "no" would be located. My finger moved faster than eyes read "yes" and I sent my best vault dweller out. I tried to grab him as he was running out to stop the process, but to no avail.



I restarted a day later. After a vault dweller returned from almost 2 days in the wasteland I came across confusing interface. I could select items and prices would be listed but a dialogue didn't come up to sell the items right then, as was the way the developers had trained us with their interface in the vault storage. I thought well maybe the sell common items is actually a button to sell items I have selected and are showing a caps value. I basically sold a lot of things I wouldn't have.



In the first case perhaps a time delay to remove dwellers and not reversing the default order where the "yes" appears on the left and "no" on the right. In the second case more consistent design would be appropriate. Did separate programmers work on different portions of the interface? Consistent interface makes it easier to teach players how to play your game.



Programming is a difficult job and I understand mistakes are made and new developers come in with less experience. Am I frustrated to some degree? Yes, I just made an account to create this forum thread. The last time I wrote on the Bethesda forums was to look for a solution for a dialogue error in Morrowind, which the developers helped fix quickly. Well thanks for listening.

User avatar
WTW
 
Posts: 3313
Joined: Wed May 30, 2007 7:48 pm

Return to Fallout 4