[Corsairs]

Originally Posted by fhomess

Markus, you need to stop thinking of your game as a web browser and start thinking of it as an application. In the web, there's a ton of things you don't care about and so things like bookmarks are great because they let you jump just to the stuff you care about. Every web surfer is different, and no one can know which information may be more interesting to one customer over another.

In a game, all the available information is important to some degree, and you can predict with a high level of accuracy what information is going to be more important to the user. That information should be in buttons, menus, and shortcut keys. The other information should be accessible with just an extra click or two, going from more abstract to greater detail. While I think that the bookmarks are useful to get the F# keys configured, the GUI design should make this only useful for more obscure pages. A good GUI would require very little use of user customized shortcut keys because it'd be very easy to find what you're looking for with a click or two, and shortcut keys to the important stuff should be built in.

As for me, the only option I selected was the back/forward button, but even that's not accurate. It's really just the back button that I use. I use one icon on the bottom of my screen - the one to check my mailbox. None of the others are useful to me. I think the buttons at the bottom of the screen would be far more useful if they could be configured to have the buttons I cared about. I'll agree with those that say the Office 2007 ribbon was hard to learn, but I do like it a fair amount better than the old way now that I understand it. I think the lesson, from a GUI standpoint, is to look at standalone applications rather than web browsers.

I tend to agree with this sentiment. The back button at the top and the email button at the bottom are far and away my two most used buttons. There's probably room from GUI improvement, but I readily admit I'm design expert and will happily defer to those who know better.