I'm aware that many threads have been created covering suggested design improvements for Battle-Net, but I feel that none of them really matched Blizzard's standard of quality or properly addressed the problems players have with the current UI.
Now that the 1.5 Beta is available, I figured it was a good time to release a mockup I made shortly after BlizzCon 2011. I've already sent this to Blizzard (yes they've seen it) so there's no need to fill this thread with "ZOMG BLIZZARD MUST SEE THIS NAOW!"
To avoid confusion, the first image is the BlizzCon 2009 preview and the second image is the BlizzCon 2011 preview. Everything else after that is my work and was made using stock/modified Blizzard assets.
At this point, I want to know what you think about my mockup. Using your feedback, I'll make another mockup matching the new design in patch 1.5. With your help, I can get a good sense of what aspects are truly important when deciding what to make room for. This mockup is largely focused on the modding portion of SC2, but I can easily expand the next mockup to include e-sports features as well.
I'll also be collaborating with my good friend OneTwo to ensure a well-rounded perspective. You may have already seen some of his work if you're a D3 fan:
I'm open to answering questions you might have and will be actively discussing any feedback you provide. You can reply here or in the Battle-Net forum thread. Keep it constructive please
It's just my version. The mockup shows how many of the desired features could be implemented. Blizzard may change this down the road, but they haven't promised anything yet.
The color and buttons are good and more consistent with the old UI than the 1.5 beta. But the only layout I like it's the second picture, others are too complicated.
I like the active games which is very much like BW Bnet 1. I'm one for simplicity and reduction of excess buttons and stuff, so I think there's a bit too many options for people to take a look at. I thought that BW's giant [JOIN GAME] was simple and effective, perhaps a few filter features could be added but I think if a lot of these other buttons were dealt away with it would be much better.
i personaly think its pretty magnificent. i love the way you handled how the comunity interacts with the hosted games section. The vote things are great.
For people who think that there is too much going on they probably dont appreaciate the way you can find all this information about the map you are looking at and see all the community feedback to it. In the past all this information has been left in the web browser but i much prefer it like this. im not going to google every map i see to get an idea of what you do.
Theres many great features in this mock-up that would be very enjoyable for me, espeacialy being able to give your hosted maps a caption. great for the modding community and for people who want to play a specific match up. Iirc blizz is adding a ladder where your MMR is unaffected so that kind of deals with the last point.
lots of good things to take from this UI, i dont agree its too much for anyone and it wouldnt take long at all to get used to anyway.
Sadly, that Blizzard will release only 1% of that awesome stuff and upgrades to their UI. They're lazy and mostly think, that 80% of their players are casuals and can be confused by numerous options (for casuals)
In my opinion you should scrap a lot of the user-input stuff such as the "how to play" sections. Pare it back a bit and allow the really good stuff such as the star ratings and the active games tab to come to the fore. I thought the map search functions looked pretty good.
I find it hilarious that you can make a better ui, tell them about it in 2011 and we still have to put up with this sh*t. They really don't care. It's actually more sad than hilarious.
Make sure you consider low screen resolutions in your mockups as well. Some of these look good but the font size used may be too small for people running lower resolutions. Just something to consider.
Your mockups have a lot of the features I think most people actually want out of Bnet 2.0, but it's also a little bloated. Too much information on a single page or too many options to click to get to a game can be offputting. In order to add in what we want, I think Blizzard would have to resign themselves to cutting out some of what we have.
"Too busy" is actually something that constantly came up when I was creating this, but something that prevented me from removing things was that when I actually thought about it, what is worth removing? I've seen a few mention things I could remove like the "How to Play" section, but I'd love to hear some specifics.
When looking at this, what are the most important parts to you as players? If I had to cut things, what features would you NOT want removed? This would help me tremendously going forward :D
EPT
