On March 16 2012 06:15 l_Kyo_l wrote: Wow, just finished watching the video. I LOVE so much what you thought of with the game summary ---> replay and the extra stats you included such as units at the end of the game, and how you can tell what's happening at what point in the game.
Such simple stuff, but for people who play thousands of games in customs/1v1 ladder sorting through them starts to get so tedious.
I really hope you get the job man, these things are far and away the best suggestions I've seen thus far.
I believe having a more advanced game summary with more stats would be beneficial for regular practices. BUT in terms of during tournaments or even for people practicing for tournaments, it will be too much. I believe blizzard made the correct decision by only allowing us to see part of the build order and really general summarys.
Everything else was completely wonderful. I really like the idea of having a button available to bring you from a game summary page to the actual replay ^^
Blizzard hire this guy IMMEDIATELY. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe these ideas that he has are only the tip of the ice burg, I can think of many many other things to be added into bnet 2.0 and I am pretty sure he knows this as well.
Good stuff, the intro of your video was pretty wordy and long-winded though. In the future, get to the good stuff faster. This is basically a demo reel, so don't make potential employers sit through a minute of talking about how you make a demo reel before you show them the demo reel.
First of all, I know that Blizzard don't have unlimited resources or a big enough staff dedicated to improving the UI but I wish they would rethink Battle.net's design and do a complete overhaul, not just add some new features (the big ones like watching replays with friends and clan support are always welcome). I'm not going to go into details about what I think is bad or missing since that has been brought up so many times before.
That being said, I think you're really talented and no doubt cut out for this. I like your approach of making the video and showcasing your ideas. The features you proposed are really good but I'd love to see you coming up with something new and fresh outside the existing UI. Even though it's probably never going to happen (Blizzard redesigning it from scratch) it would be nice if you could show us what you have in mind for a completely new UI.
I'm a fan of Goblinoid's designs and if anyone is not familiar with his work, please check out his thread and his interactive UI.
Support this man! Replays and Match history are the ONLY tools I use consistently and sadly they are just so underwhelming right now. It just seems so non-user friendly right now...
So I LOVE THESE PROPOSED CHANGES, I think they would be great for the game
So... That was amazing no? Let's all spam blzizard forums with how this guy should be the lead designer and the lead designer at Blizzard needs to be fired, immediately.
On March 16 2012 18:05 Madera wrote: First of all, I know that Blizzard don't have unlimited resources or a big enough staff dedicated to improving the UI but I wish they would rethink Battle.net's design and do a complete overhaul, not just add some new features (the big ones like watching replays with friends and clan support are always welcome). I'm not going to go into details about what I think is bad or missing since that has been brought up so many times before.
That being said, I think you're really talented and no doubt cut out for this. I like your approach of making the video and showcasing your ideas. The features you proposed are really good but I'd love to see you coming up with something new and fresh outside the existing UI. Even though it's probably never going to happen (Blizzard redesigning it from scratch) it would be nice if you could show us what you have in mind for a completely new UI.
I'm a fan of Goblinoid's designs and if anyone is not familiar with his work, please check out his thread and his interactive UI.
I dunno if you know, but Blizzard has nearly unlimited resources in retrospect to the gaming industry (that's the whole idea of all the joking about them ruling everything) The financial income they receive just from WoW could support 10 UI teams, and still be profitable...
I'm not trying to drown your dreams in sorrow, but your video IS NOT an application for an artist. Your video ecompasses mostly programming changes, and has little to do with visuals. Artists develop content for, or with developers to pass along common goals and overarching reaches of their department. They do not develop, program, or implement wide sweeping user interface changes. Also, the changes that you suggest would anatogize a huge corporation like Blizzard Entertainment who already employs, and has a solid core of fundamentals that they want and desire in the game. It is not your position, especially as an artist, to dictate what they want as a company--suggestions are fine, and there's nothing wrong with it.
If you intended the actual changes you suggest to be (somehow) thought of as merely cosmetic, and have no functionality then I can almost see your vision. But as it is, when you accept a position in nearly ANY company, your role is first to familiarize yourself with the OUSTANDING amount of work that is required by your superiors and team. It is not your duty to act as if you are the LEAD PRODUCER or DEVELOPER, such is the case with your vision. Finally, and personally, most of the changes that you call for are ENTIRELY REDUNDANT and actually confuse the already existing interface. I don't know what analogy would help you, but the next time you get into your car and reach for the fan control, think about how you already know where it is. Now, say I add a few redundant changes, such as add fan control to your steering wheel, or fan control to your in-dash setup, or in your computer--completely redundant. Say I remove the original one, or offer different but all-together similar choices--totally CONFUSING. Also, you seem to think tagging is essentially good, but IT IS NOT. The UI needs to be effective in its SIMPLICITY, not because it lacks choices or variables. End of rant, and I'm sorry, but don't be offended.
On March 16 2012 06:04 alteredsego wrote: Background: So I prepared this video as part of my application to Blizzard Entertainment to become one of their User Interface Artists for StarCraft 2 and Blizzard DOTA. It is intended to demonstrate some of the changes I would make to StarCraft 2’s existing interface layout; specifically in the Match History and Replay portions of the menu. It is however not production ready work or in any way functional at this point. Rather it is a rough draft that simply demonstrates how I envision some those areas being changed to help improve their functionality. Some of the changes are relatively minor, and some are more major; as they represent a complete overhaul of how the replay file management works. As I thought the video came out reasonably well: I wanted to share it one here. Obviously if you like any of my proposed changes: I would greatly appreciate you taking the time to thumbs up the video or leave a comment on youtube or in the blizzard forums. (As any attention it gets might help get my resume noticed, and might potentially lead to me getting the job… I generally don’t ask for this kind of thing, but community support never hurts.)
Regardless, you can watch the video at the link below (it is 7:04 long I think, 8:18 with credits… so not a huge time investment), and I am interested to see what you think of my proposals. So without further ado, here is the link:
Thanks to anyone that takes the time to watch it, and once again if you take the time to leave a comment or like it: I would be genuinely appreciative. If you feel up to it the original post on Blizzard's SC2 Forums is here.
Very good job.
A few thoughts: I don't like the idea of only being able to send replays to friends. B.net 2.0 is already set up in such a way that you can't even talk to someone unless they're your friend. Why don't you just let the replay be sent to anyone you enter into a text box?
The frames, buttons, and layout of B.net 2.0 is very ugly and inconsistent. While you've improved the functionality of B.net 2.0 tenfold, it's still just as ugly.
If you get a job at Blizzard, please push for a complete design of the the UI art from the ground up. And get them to reverse this pointless trend of only being able to interact with friends, or being force to friend someone before you interact with them.
While I think this guy has some great ideas, I was unclear as to whether or not he actually knows, or has any idea, about how to program. It is easy to say "This is something good!" but have no idea how much time or work that would take.
On March 16 2012 19:07 ffdestiny wrote: I'm not trying to drown your dreams in sorrow, but your video IS NOT an application for an artist. Your video ecompasses mostly programming changes, and has little to do with visuals. Artists develop content for, or with developers to pass along common goals and overarching reaches of their department. They do not develop, program, or implement wide sweeping user interface changes. Also, the changes that you suggest would anatogize a huge corporation like Blizzard Entertainment who already employs, and has a solid core of fundamentals that they want and desire in the game. It is not your position, especially as an artist, to dictate what they want as a company--suggestions are fine, and there's nothing wrong with it.
If you intended the actual changes you suggest to be (somehow) thought of as merely cosmetic, and have no functionality then I can almost see your vision. But as it is, when you accept a position in nearly ANY company, your role is first to familiarize yourself with the OUSTANDING amount of work that is required by your superiors and team. It is not your duty to act as if you are the LEAD PRODUCER or DEVELOPER, such is the case with your vision. Finally, and personally, most of the changes that you call for are ENTIRELY REDUNDANT and actually confuse the already existing interface. I don't know what analogy would help you, but the next time you get into your car and reach for the fan control, think about how you already know where it is. Now, say I add a few redundant changes, such as add fan control to your steering wheel, or fan control to your in-dash setup, or in your computer--completely redundant. Say I remove the original one, or offer different but all-together similar choices--totally CONFUSING. Also, you seem to think tagging is essentially good, but IT IS NOT. The UI needs to be effective in its SIMPLICITY, not because it lacks choices or variables. End of rant, and I'm sorry, but don't be offended.
... You wouldn't happen to work for Blizzards UI team would you? None of what he said was "redundant", in fact it was EXACTLY what is missing from Blizzards attempt (that's a key word, because it was a failed attempt) at "simplicity" as you said. He actually compartmentalized the poorly made UI, made it MORE efficient to SIMPLISTICALLY navigate and whatever you are ranting on about has NOTHING to do with his attempts at becoming an artist (or obviously Designer because like you said his changes are mainly design based) but are somehow related to thinking his changes are bad (or redundant) and you have some vendetta.
To use your awful car analogy, imagine this, you buy an old Corolla, it has normal gas intake and a AC on the dash like any other corolla. (this is starcraft BW) nothing fancy, everything is there to handle. Now you have the new Hybrid Ford Fusion, Electric gas powered machine, save on gas, efficent driving, style, sleek, but instead of getting to your AC which usto be in a single place (the dashboard) you NOW because of how the UI is designed have your AC/Radio/CD player ALL seperated by a dash board compartment, so now you have to open seperate compartments to reach things that are all related in the sense of secondary need, but a need nonetheless, so here's where the analogy kicks in if you haven't pieced this together after your god awful attempt at belittling his work that completely (in 5 days) improved on a system that is pathetic. The seperated compartments, for the "efficient" new model are the SC2 user interface, the upgrades are simply removing the horrid compartmentalized model and making a more easy to use efficient model
This was, unlike yours, a well thought out rebut to your claim over his work. Please next time, before you place your uneducated, lack of thought opinions on someones work that they really worked hard on in an facetious manner, please think a bit harder or if you have trouble doing that, refrain from typing at all.
Thank you.
On March 16 2012 19:46 how wrote: While I think this guy has some great ideas, I was unclear as to whether or not he actually knows, or has any idea, about how to program. It is easy to say "This is something good!" but have no idea how much time or work that would take.
I don't understand what you're getting at, don't take this wrong I could be incorrect, but he stated it took him 5 days to implement these changes on his own computer (so through his own file of SC2) into a working model. The actual transfer of data/programming required (I am a graduate of Computer Sciences are UNB, with a degree in this field and working for RIM) would not take an even half ass UI team (which I hope Blizzard intends on finding) more than 1-2 weeks to create and implement efficently without any mistakes. The more skilled the team, the less time it would take. His changes were not COMPLETELY reworking the system, it was just modding the workings. The only real additions of difficulty would be the programming of getting the Replay organizer/tag system implemented because that is "new" in regards to the system.
EDIT: To expand on this, it is also the companies job to keep players interested long enough to purchase HOTS and the LotV, so it is there JOB because they want to make MONEY to upgrade the game to a level at which is acceptable in this day an age. Spend money to make money, upgrade to grow fan base. It's no secret the UI team for Blizzard is awful, if you didn't notice they are trying to fuck (key word: Fuck as in totally break the entire game, and ruin it) Diablo III's chat system which was one of the BIGGEST FREAKING PARTS, just like they did with sc2...
For a UI Artist application I was disappointed at the lack of examples of your artwork. I think Blizzard won't be interested in your ideas (they probably already have the design documentation for upcoming bnet). But they will want an artist who can design new interfaces using existing art styles.
I think you would have been better served by redesigning bnet with a zerg/hots theme as a display of artistic skill while adding some of your own ideas.
On March 16 2012 19:47 NeMeSiS3 wrote: It's no secret the UI team for Blizzard is awful, if you didn't notice they are trying to fuck (key word: Fuck as in totally break the entire game, and ruin it) Diablo III's chat system which was one of the BIGGEST FREAKING PARTS, just like they did with sc2...
The Blizzard UI artists are good. A UI artist is in charge of the graphics of the UI not the functionality, you are thinking of the decisions the lead designer for Battle.net makes which is a totally different position.
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
Netscape wasn't the first company to make this mistake. Borland made the same mistake when they bought Arago and tried to make it into dBase for Windows, a doomed project that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and astonishing people with how few features it had. Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one.
On March 16 2012 18:40 NeMeSiS3 wrote: I dunno if you know, but Blizzard has nearly unlimited resources in retrospect to the gaming industry (that's the whole idea of all the joking about them ruling everything) The financial income they receive just from WoW could support 10 UI teams, and still be profitable...
This is a little bit of a hyperbole. Blizzard also has some business sense and they know that hiring 10 more people to design the UI is very unlikely to recuperate the cost. There aren't many lost sales due to "the UI is functional" instead of "the UI is good". But like I said, I do feel that they have focused a little bit too much on "what makes this game sell" instead of "how do we make an outstanding game in every regard" with SC2 and D3 and scaled their dedicated staff accordingly. But that's just the feeling I get, I got little in the way of actually proving that.
It's a nice video but given its purpose it comes across as somewhat cocky (but that might also be due to cultural differences).
A few things that stood out to me while watching:
(1) low signal/noise ratio - a lot of "awesome", "great", "groundbreaking", ... and similar fluff - I found myself fast-forwarding several times because I wanted to get to the actual content and you were just talking about how great everything is without explaining what is great and why it is great.
(2) you don't seem to give a lot of thought to the question of why things are the way they are. Blizzard's UI designers are probably not stupid and while the lack of some functionality may be attributed to deadlines it is more likely that most of it is the result of deliberate decisions (which you should strive to understand before improving on them).
(3) you don't explain the rationale behind your proposed changes other than "I'd like to have this functionality, it makes my life easier". the users of Starcraft are probably not one homogenous group and it's even less likely that they are one homogenous group that shares exactly your preferences you should try to identify different classes of users, what their objectives are when using the replay/match history system and which workflows they have developed to achieve these objectives. Special attention to those users that don't use the system at all - do they ignore it because they don't need it, because they don't know about it or because they can't find a suitable workflow for doing what they want to do? Then you can take the issues you identified via usability testing and assign them to the tasks/workflows they impact. For each change you should have a clear idea which tasks it simplifies, for which classes of users this task is relevant and what the trade-off of the change is - whose workflows do you make more complex or even impossible, how does your change affect the overall complexity (and learning curve) of the product, ... almost no non-trivial change is unequivocally beneficial to all users.
I'm no designer but I worked as a software developer for a company that does usability testing and UI design for a wide range of clients - from car controls to websites. Based on that experience I would really prefer a simple printed mockup or even sketch (seperate for each individual change, no matter how small) along with a written description and justification of that change to the sort of advertisment video you provide. IMHO the video format and its limitations make you focus too much on the specific results you arrive at (which Blizzard will discard anyways) instead of showing off the methodology & reasoning you use to arrive at these results (which are the qualities Blizzard would hire you for).
On March 16 2012 19:47 NeMeSiS3 wrote: I don't understand what you're getting at, don't take this wrong I could be incorrect, but he stated it took him 5 days to implement these changes on his own computer (so through his own file of SC2) into a working model. The actual transfer of data/programming required (I am a graduate of Computer Sciences are UNB, with a degree in this field and working for RIM) would not take an even half ass UI team (which I hope Blizzard intends on finding) more than 1-2 weeks to create and implement efficently without any mistakes. The more skilled the team, the less time it would take. His changes were not COMPLETELY reworking the system, it was just modding the workings. The only real additions of difficulty would be the programming of getting the Replay organizer/tag system implemented because that is "new" in regards to the system.
I think you're underestimating the complexity of the proposed changes somewhat. Especially the linking of replay-database to match history is far from trivial. Currently, the replay-browser is nothing more than a very basic file browser inside the SC2 client. All the replay files are directly accessible outside SC2 as well. The match history on the other side is a server-side system, which allows players to view the match history of others. Linking these two will require some major reworking of these systems.
Blizzard would implement this and many more but the technology simply isn't there yet. These ideas are ok but i don't think that Blizzard's develepers are lacking ideas, i think they haven't put in resources and efforts to upgrade their shitty UI. This next patch could be something that changes that.
EPT
