Lord of the Over Complication
by K. Michael Alexander
It is no secret MMOs love their icons. Icons for everything, abilities, items, clothing, fast travel and more. Most even allow you to make your own icons for whatever you want. It’s an icon Smörgåsbord! I wasn’t surprised when I stumbled upon this little menu in Lord of the Rings Online to find yet more icons. What I was surprised to learn was that over 50% of this menu was unusable, and in reality, kind of pointless.
The picture above is the menu for housing permissions. Instead of a single interface that does the job of both selection and permission Turbine has opted to split the controls. In fact those icons in the upper half are completely unclickable, they don’t do anything other then display what you have already selected below. It’s redundant. The icons would appear to be buttons, but in fact they are nothing more than notification. Confusing, yes.
Why it was made overly complicated to begin with is really beyond me. The solution would be the simple merging of these two interfaces. It would greatly increase the usability and simplicity of the menu, and reduce user frustration. Seamless and smooth menu interfaces allow the users to spend less time adjusting and more time doing what they want: playing.
Comments
Wow. That menu could use a bit of an update. However, I am fine with Turbine focusing on improving features used by more people than just kinship admins.
While you are pondering the changes you would make why don’t you give officers “use” access so we can drink out of the large cask of ale sitting in the kinship house!
Keep in mind this is the same menu that all users get when they open housing permissions, what’s pre-populated depends on the type of houses. Kinship houses get the kinship ranks, whereas regular houses would not.