inglorious

The hot bar dominates MMOs when it comes to management of abilities and skills. Increasing popularity of these games along side massive successes like World of Warcraft have started a trickle down effect. Similar UI/UX is managing to spill into other genres as well. It doesn’t matter if you are playing a wizard in an MMO or a space marine in a RTS, sooner or later everyone will be subjected to the hotbar.

In most games there is little problem with this system in the beginning. A low level or starting character usually knows and owns little within the game world. Until a player reaches higher levels they won’t really see the inherit problems with the system. After a certain point, the hot bar ceases to be functional and becomes a nuisance. Tens if not hundreds of icons swim before your eyes each displaying status, recharge times, amounts and many other functions.

A hardcore gamer would chock this up to skill, claiming that the rote memorization required to play each class is part of the learning curve. I would disagree with this on principle. Requiring memorization starts to seep the fun out of a game for a casual player. A leisure activity becomes work, and a large portion of the audience, won’t want to memorize icons for their entertainment.

Don Norman once said, “Complexity is not bad. Complicated is bad.” He’s right, as long as a complicated system is organized in a clear and concise way a new player won’t be put off from interacting with the environment.

How do we allow users to take this one step further and make this complicated system easy to use? How do we move beyond the messy hotbar and streamline the system into something simple and more functional?

I have a few ideas and I am sure the community does as well. I intend “Solving the Hotbar” to be an ongoing series for discussion among the community. Is the hot bar truly broken? What would you as a user or a designer like or dislike? Send in your thoughts to: kmalexander at inglorio.us or drop a comment.