[2022] Compact Mode

We want to start off by thanking you all for the great feedback that you have been giving. It’s been awesome to see your enthusiasm for the UI in-game and it is helping us a lot when making design decisions.

As we mentioned earlier we are showing you Photon in the early stage of development. That means we are showing you this with some broken windows, bugs and some concepts that we have not yet implemented. That also means that there are a lot of defects that our engineers have to plow through before we can act on the changes based on your feedback. But having said that we still managed to make some tweaks to the UI before releasing it on TQ. We for exampled removed extra spacing and adjusted components in the fleet window and D-scan. We adjusted the background opacity so it works better on light backgrounds and the text doesn’t bleed out as much. These are examples of steps we’ve taken in reaction to your feedback but by no means an exhaustive list.

The most frequent feedback we are getting concerns the padding, spacing and sizing of elements. We would like to take this opportunity and show you some ideas on how we want to tackle that. Right now we have a UI that relies heavily on windows, and having many windows open at once to have the relevant information and actions at hand. We understand that when we add padding to one window it will affect the number of windows that we can have at a time as well as the amount of content visible in each window. Simultaneously we want to increase legibility and establish a hierarchy of elements, especially for new players.

Compact Mode
We want to extend the use of a compact mode for windows, we already have a similar use case in the inventory window but we would like to extend it to other windows and improve its usage. In these windows, we will have smaller spacing between elements, smaller components, and less margin space around the window. Here is an example of the people and places window in normal mode vs compact mode.

Normal_vs_Compact1239×1134 89.8 KB

In Compact Mode we are exploring space savings even further by removing the header and replacing it with an icon in the top right corner which expands to the window controls and header. Example shown below.

Other examples of window in compact mode.

Examples1283×407 194 KB

We’re planning to implement Compact Mode for the following windows over the coming weeks.

• Fleet window
• D scan
• Probe scanner
• Watch list
• People and places
• Locations
• Chat
• Overview
• Drones
• Inventory - compact mode

Again, thanks for all the feedback you have already provided and we look forward to hear more from you.

Thanks everyone for all your efforts on making Photon UI the best it can be.

With the launch of Compact Windows on TQ in patch 20.06 there is a new thread feedback thread which can be found HERE.