I really love the new UI but there is one thing that I’d like to be considered for further improvement: Are you aware you can hit Escape to dismiss dialogs? Re: confirmation dialogs… I’m leery of bypassing *all* confirmation dialogs ever… that sounds like a recipe for a supremely frustrating experience maybe 10% of the time. I can add this to my to-do list for 11.10. For instance, we have commands to open flight configuration, to jump straight to Failures or Weight & Balance… I could definitely see adding a command to jump straight to the Weather “customize” screen and auto-focus the search box. In general, I think our plan for making the UI faster to navigate for power users is to provide (yet) more keyboard shortcuts. But, if we put keyboard focus on the text box, the text box would “eat” the Enter/Escape keys, so it would take *two* presses of the key to say “I’m done with flight configuration”. That makes it super quick to confirm or cancel (no mouse needed). Re: the airports, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword: right now, when you pop open the flight config window, the Enter key applies your changes, and Escape closes the window. So far, initial reviews are positive-if you’ve tried it out, please let us know your thoughts. Overall, I was extremely happy with the re-design process-I really enjoyed working with the team at Laminar Research and we feel we really improved the user experience on X-Plane 11. Gone are the folder views and unmanageably long text lists instead, users can now filter along all sorts of dimensions. For version 11, all text-based selections support filters and/or search. X-Plane is a very comprehensive and powerful flight simulator, and as such, there’s an incredible amount of configuration that needs to take place before taking flight. In some cases, there’s no avoiding text lists. We’ve worked hard to provide a comprehensive list of interactive images of your hardware, so you don’t just have a text list of buttons that don’t mean anything. Under the settings screens, joystick configuration has been vastly improved. Previously, if you wanted to pick where you were going to start at an airport, you had to navigate through a long text list of runways and ramps now you can use the visual location picker and just click on the map.įor weather, there’s no more text descriptions of cloud and wind layer heights just click and drag! You also get visual indicators of precipitation, and real weather gives you a preview that looks exactly the same. A sample of the X-Plane 11 Component library Let’s Get Visualįor X-Plane 11, we wanted to make everything as visual as possible-long, condensed lists of aircraft, airports and settings were dropped in favour of tiles, maps and ‘wizard-type’ user flows. This made extending the interface fast and easy and provided a consistent point of reference for UI elements. I started with the blue value from previous versions of X-Plane but created a darker overall scheme to use.Īll of this was collected into a Component Library. I tend towards monochromatic colour schemes with gradations of each colour filling out the palette. An updated colour palette was also developed for X-Plane 11. It offered a comfortable reading experience for UI elements and the ability to easily extend the brand online. We explored several font families and decided on Roboto. Often when going through this exercise, I frequently find a font family I think will work for the interface, only to discover its legibility is less than ideal. And the results are always viewed on screen since that is where users will be experiencing the product. Font weights, text colour, letter spacing and line height are carefully considered for each typeface option. Unless a strong brand is already established, I like to start with typography on most projects like this. Now, two and a half years later, we can finally talk about it! Back to Basics So instead, we decided to redesign the user interface from the ground up. We took that criticism seriously, but we didn’t want to incrementally improve the user interface and the experience of using X-Plane when improvements were needed throughout the entire application. Of course the number one response was the user interface. The most common response was, overwhelmingly… the flight model ( cue rimshot). One of the questions was: If you could improve one area of X-Plane, what would it be? A few years ago, we ran a survey of X-Plane users.
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