While playing Vampyr recently, I noticed several annoying things when related to menus and user interface. One of the issues I encountered was about the weapons upgrades. After looking at it in more details I had few ideas that i thought might help the understandability of the interface.
Below is the original interface from the game:
Here are the things that I noticed there: first the upgrade mentions that it is an 10% increase in damage, but it is not possible to not how much it actually means compared to previous damage since you cannot compare it to how much damage the weapon deals prior to the upgrade. Second, the phrasing "increase damage dealt by 10%" is fairly long and only puts the "10%" at the end of the sentence which is the main point. Third, the attack speed and stamina numbers contains decimals which is not useful here and just adds more complexity. Fourth, the readability of the number of parts you have is bad, as the numbers can blend with the background. Lastly, the term "ingredient" might not be the best choice in my opinion, for upgrading a weapon, and it is not clear why you can't upgrade your weapon if you don't take the time to see the numbers of parts you have and the amount needed for the upgrade.
Here is a "soft" redesign of the interface to solve the few issues mentioned:
The redesign solves the issues by:
- Providing the actual damage increase you get from the upgrade (green up triangle with +16 to show the increase)
- "+10% DAMAGE DEALT" replaces "increase damage dealt by 10%" to make it more clear and to the point. Also, it was written in green to provide a greater contrast and a color that reflects a more positive upgrade unlike the red from before.
- "Cannot craft: You don't have the required spare parts" replaced the term "ingredients" to first provide an error message and explain the users why they can't upgrade their weapon and spare parts was used instead of ingredients.
- Numbers for stamina and attack speed were simplified by removing decimals.
These were slight changes that don't drastically modified the UI, but could help make the interface easier to understand.
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