Early, early, early this morning Touch Arcade’s Eli Hodapp (who apparently doesn’t sleep) posted the above video for the release of Anrufen Online, a cross platform MMO, now available on the App Store [Link for the Bold.]

I guess subscribers to Anrufen Online might find this exciting, but the video did little to peek my interest in the MMO. Still, I summoned my courage and I downloaded it. I’ll be honest, I spent very little time with this game. Maybe ten to twenty minutes, what I found really put me off.

Inglorious appears in the world of Anrufen.

The UI and control scheme is, well, at it’s best it’s awful. I found the UI to be clunky, confusing, crowded and ugly. Icons are a muddy mess, surrounded by these stylization elements that server little purpose. When screen real-estate is at a premium, you don’t waste precious space by over styling your UI. A large majority of the screen is covered up by the players thumb when moving about. Onscreen text is a mess, and I am not sure whats going on in that mini map in the upper right hand corner.

So, this might have viruses in it? Wait a second!

While technically impressive to port your MMO to the IPhone, all it does it strengthens the idea that while it’s possible, is this really necessary? If you’re looking to get your MMORPG fix on the go, I’d look somewhere else, or hope and pray that Anrufen’s developer WiSTONE‘s takes a solid pass at correcting the issues after this first release.

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.

Scharmm can be quoted at one point saying:

“One thing you can point to to say it is an excellent UI is that other games have used the same time of thing.”

I would encourage UI designers to avoid this type of thinking. Just because an idea is popular doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good. A lot of things can be done to improve upon the Blizzard’s UI. In the next few weeks I’ll be introducing a segment on Inglorious I am going to called “Solving the Hotbar” where I’ll discuss improvements that can be made to make gameplay easier and more fun.

If MMO UI is your thing you may want to give the podcast a listen. You can check it out by:

[iTunes] Subscribe to the WoW Insider Show directly in iTunes.
[RSS] Add the WoW Insider Show to your RSS aggregator.
[MP3] Download the MP3 directly.

I thought this was an interesting install screen. I wanted to check out phasing, a local instance concept Blizzard introduced with the latest World of Warcraft expansion: Wrath of the Litch King. While watching the game install I noticed an attractive little bonus that made the install-watching much more pleasant. Blizzard entertains by displaying a story that gives a bit of a history on the game and the world. The user can navigate though the slides via a left and right arrows. It was a subtle and nice touch, allowing me, the user to move though the slides at my own pace.

I’ve seen a few other installers attempt this, and most of the time they automatically flip you through the narrative as the installer hits various percentages of install. Most of the time it moves too slow or two fast. Blizzard also slowly flips though slides but it gives plenty of time and the fact I can always go back a slide helps it not feel so rushed. The ambiguous “stop” button floating at the bottom was one minor usability issue that bugged me. This stops the installation but it’s located near the narrative, a user could confuse that with stopping the auto-playing slides as opposed to the installation.

Blizzard could flip the placement of the narrative and the progress bar; it would assist in tying the stop button with the installation and also tie the narrative in with the slides. Even with that minor issue it was nice to have a story recap that didn’t feel forced upon me or tedious to follow as I waited for the next 10% to be installed.

A recent post over at Massively featured an interview with Net Devil‘s Scott Brown in which he detailed some little tidbits about Jumpgate Evolution‘s UI. The article quote Brown saying,

“There’s still a little bit more work to do that, so I don’t know if it’ll be ready at launch, but all of our UI is built in Flash. This is with the idea that anybody can build something with Flash and put it in the game.”

Flash is an excellent tool, it’ll be exciting to see what players will create and build that gives Jumpgate that extra oomph. This is neat and all, but these days aren’t customizable HUDs in MMOs expected? World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, all the big names allow users to mod the HUD to me I would say it was breaking a players expectations to not allow custom UI.