R226 UI Update: Main Menu (Updated 4/28/21)

I agree about supports - because they have been mostly static on my roster for over a year or more, I nearly never open that tab. Making it more (or keeping it as) prominent isn't going to change that player behavior on my part, because I've long since attached them to whoever and then forgotten about where they are.

IceIX said:

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if we take a look at the relative size of the elements on the new hub screen, you can start to see that some thought was being given to attempting to afford players ways to jump to what they probably want to be doing relatively painlessly - get into whatever event is ending soonest (I guess that's how that featured event is populated?) is the largest clickable element that's in the upper left of the screen, which is where the eyes of Left to Right, Top to Bottom reading languages are going to begin scanning a page. Incedentally, upper left is the biomechanically easiest place to move a mouse cursor for a right-handed user, but on a phone, that is the longest (most uncomfortable) stretch for a right-thumb on a right handed phone user playing single handed. You can't win that one on phones for handedness unless you just have a single vertical column of buttons that stretch all the way across the screen, so that is probably just anecdotal trivia more than any meaningful critique.

Then with relatively equal size priority you have Story and Versus, with Story taking the upper position implying they expect we're wanting to go first to that one. Then you have the big Quest In Progress section which tells you Quests exist and I guess whichever you are closest to completing, though of course we've seen that some people who are saving the rewards strategically are having some near-miss collection moments since it's not user definiable which quest we actually care about right now. Then in the bottom right, arguably the position of least priority we have a featured store offer that jumps you to the store. Then you have the Resupply and VIP buttons that are straddling the jump, which is an invitation to scroll down, and then at the very bottom we have the old prologue now called Campaign, which is a fine spot for it for anyone who's been playing more than a couple weeks, but I'm curious what happens on a brand new download there, since that's where you have to spend your time grinding for a bit. 

That leaves us with the lower nav bar, which has a very high priority placed on jumping to the stores, which is fine, we spend a lot of time there, and then equal priority given to Supports/Roster/Alliance/Quests. I think this lower nav is good in how it's layed out, and it does give us now the opporutnity to engage with quest claiming from within an event, which is nice as long as you have open quests to claim (for me I'm down to nearly all daily quests, but that's almost certainly atypical for the bulk of players). I do wish that this persistent nav bar let us swap between story and versus, becuase it's pretty common for me to wrap up one and move to the other. Maybe not from within a story sub, but certainly from the story or versus hubs themselves. So it seems we've made a tradeoff on click count where we used to have to click back twice to engage with claiming quest rewards but could tab between Versus and Story from anywhere to the reverse of that, which I think is lateral at best, but marginally less good as an experience.

I will say putting in that folder on the main hub as a visual metaphor for my vine of collectable rewards and naming it Inbox is not the icon I'd have chosen. When you go to the alliance tab, it has a file folder visual metaphor on it with tabs between chat, details of your own alliance, and a search to others, and the idea of "inbox" tells me I should be expecting communications from somebody - either the devs or my alliance mates or something.