Guild Wars 2

Over the course of Sunday I collected responses from a lot of you through Reddit related to your opinions across a number of parameters regarding the GW2 User Interface.
I asked for your opinions on the UI in terms of practicality, distraction, aesthetics and clarity. And then went on to ask you more open questions about possible UI changes, most and least useful elements and finally any additional features you’d like to see.

In total I received a staggering 710 responses. Frankly I only expected 50, so managing to get so many was absolutely fantastic, so I am truly appreciative of all your help. Below I’m going to post a summary of the results – it is hugely long, so skip to the end for the TL;DR if you aren’t interested.

Q1 – Practicality

41.1% (292) of participants felt that the UI was “somewhat practical” with 22.3% (158) of participants feeling it was “very practical”. In total, only 6.3% (45) of participants responded that the UI was “very impractical”.

Interestingly, 23.8% of participants who stated that they had played for more than 2000 hours also felt the UI was “very impractical” – the highest value for this variable across the total hours played groups. Conversely, participants who played the most hours also scored the lowest for “very practical” (4.8%).
24% of participants who reported the smallest number of total hours played also reported that the UI was “very practical”, which is higher than the other groups for this variable.

Q2 – Distraction

45.1% (320) of participants felt that the UI was “not very distracting” and 24.1% felt that it was “not distracting at all”.
Conversely, only 1.8% (13) of participants felt that it was “very distracting”. Overall, participants felt very positively about the UI in terms of its level of distraction.

Again, participants with more than 2000 hours played in the game reported that the UI was “very distracting” with a higher frequency than all the other groups for this variable, they also reported that the UI was “not very distracting” with a lower frequency than the other groups in the variable:

The chi-squared test produced a p-value of 0.009 for Hours vs Distraction, again suggesting that the relationship between the two variables is statistically significant.

Q3 – Aesthetics

Again, participants selected the second from top option “somewhat pretty” with a higher frequency than all the other options (42.5%). Only 11 out of the 710 participants selected the “very ugly” option.

Unlike the previous variables, the chi-squared test did not produce a p-value suggesting that there was a statistically significant relationship between total hours played and perceived aesthetic appeal. However, when the frequency of log-in data was compared with the aesthetic appeal data there was found to be a p-value of 0.01 – suggesting that there was a statistically significant relationship between the two pieces of data, whereby players who logged in more often felt that the UI was more aesthetically pleasing. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of the sample logged into the game “at least once a day” (68.9%), and participants who logged in “less than once a month” or didn’t play the game at all anymore made up only 2.7% – so this statistic is not necessarily representative of the population.

Q4 – Clarity

Participants responded with the second to top response most frequently: “Somewhat clear” (45.2% – 321 participants), the least selected option was “very unclear” with 2.1% (15). 74.9% of participants selected the top two options, suggesting a very positive opinion of the clarity of information in the

The chi-squared between hours played and clarity produced a p-value of 0.015 – suggesting a statistically significant relationship between the two variables. Participants who played for more than 2000 hours were more likely to state the interface was “very unclear” – 14.3% compared to the 1-500 hours group who only selected this option 1.8% of the time.
There was no statistical significance between regularity of log-in and perceived clarity.

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The open questions section of the survey afforded the participants the opportunity to expand further on any ideas or opinions they might have had about the UI.

Q5 – If you could change one thing about the UI, what would it be?

One of the most oft-requested changes was to allow the movement, resizing and hiding of UI elements to suit user needs. Currently the customisability of the UI is relatively low. The word cloud below demonstrates the importance of movement, options, sizing and resizing and, perhaps most importantly, customisability.

[WordCloud for Changes!](http://i.imgur.com/WQsuYZT.png)

Some participants expressed a frustration with the art design. ArenaNet press-releases have always stated that they want to present their game in a “painterly” style (ArenaNet, MMO Manifesto, https://www.guildwars2.com/media/videos#vlb/bKtGxVj3msM, 2010), but some participants found the design to be overly distracting or simply unappealing: “Remove all the unnecessary black outlines and stylish splash arts; it reduces the already abysmal field of view and makes for an unpleasant experience after you’ve played a lot” (Participant 98).

Some other more specific suggestions included adding further bars to allow quick access to items in the inventory: “I would add slots next to the skill bar for food, potions and maybe a mini-pet. Having to activate these items from the inventory means I often forget to use them” (Participant 596), changing the health “orb” to the standard “bar” format, or allowing the introduction of 3rd party programs to expand the options available with the UI.

Q6 – Which is the most useful part of the interface?

The answers for this particular question were so numerous and varied it was difficult to bring them together to identify salient trends in the data. This, in itself is an important point – almost every participant felt that there was a different part of the UI which was most useful. There were, however, some prevailing trends which cropped up more often than others:

[WordCloud for Most Useful!](http://i.imgur.com/51uszuv.png)

Participants often stated that they liked the simplicity of the interface, they found that this kept everything out of their line of sight and helped them concentrate on the gameplay: “None particularly. Everything’s pretty out of the way, which is good in a way” (Participant 522).

The mini-map in the bottom right side of the screen was the feature which gained the most praise. Participants liked being able to zoom in and out, they liked the way it allowed them to read information from it, but also interact with it by clicking certain elements within it: “The mini-map. Quick waypointing and movement across the entire zone” (Participant 543).

Participants also liked how the health orb was centered in the screen: “Health bar. It’s extremely clear and placed nicely in the middle.” (Participant 665). They felt that this allowed them to focus centrally, and not get too distracted away from the action in the middle of the screen.

Q7 – Which part of the interface do you use the least?

As with the results for the previous question, participants gave very varied answers to this particular question, however, there were some salient threads to pick out of the data.

[WordCloud for Least Useful!](http://i.imgur.com/lQV95yE.png)

Participants felt that the menu bar in the top left of the screen was relatively unimportant, particularly once they knew the assigned keybinds to access each of the functions: “The shortcuts in the top left. I just use the shortcuts on my keyboard.” (Participant 401).

Participants identified the experience bar which runs across the bottom of their screen as being superfluous once they’d reached the maximum character level: “The XP bar? Everything else I use regularly for combat, navigation or socialization. The XP bar just takes up some extra space imo.” (Participant 325).

Participants were not impressed with the inability to hide or remove certain elements, like the quest tracker: “Personal story reminder I can’t turn off” (Participant 246).

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Q8 – If you could have one additional feature to the interface, what would that feature be?

The feature requested most was the ability to access the character inventory from the main UI. This was often expressed through a “consumables tab” which would give the player access to their player-boosting food and potions without having to open their inventory: “I would like a consumables bar, for ease of access to food, potions, minipets, etc” (Participant 242).

Participants used this space to emphasise the need for greater customisation of layout, resizing and hiding/removing certain UI elements: “possibility to move every part of it, and choose to display/not display every single part of it individually” (Participant 221). Participants felt they needed the opportunity to move parts of the UI which they felt were more useful, to the centre of the screen.

[WordCloud for Feature!](http://i.imgur.com/L3nU8w0.png)

It is interesting to note that when given the chance to perhaps add a new feature entirely, the most oft-requested functionality is to have more control over the existing elements of the interface.

In Conclusion

The majority of participants rated the UI positively in terms of practicality, distraction, aesthetics and clarity. There was, however, a correlation between total number of hours played and a number negative opinions of the UI.

It might have been easy to explain these negative opinions by stating a number of gaming culture principles such as “burnout” (Syncaine, Hardcore Casual Blog, 2008: http://syncaine.com/2008/06/26/breaking-down-mmo-burnout-and-ways-to-avoid-it/) but when “total hours played” is compared against “frequency of log-in” the data shows that 92.5% of 2000+ hour participants also log in every day.

Instead, perhaps there are elements of the UI which are less useful for veteran players, but are more useful for players who are newer to the game. In a recent interview, Colin Johansson (ArenaNet Lead Game Designer) stated that assisting and guiding new players is an important element of the game and this ethic has been instilled even into the design of the UI (demonstrated by their reluctance to allow players to hide the quest log which might guide new players to their next objective, but which become distracting to more experienced players) (William Knight, GuildMag Blog; Community Lunch with Colin Johansson, 2013: http://www.guildmag.com/community-lunch-with-colin-johanson).

Nielsen’s 10 heuristics for good interface design (1994) suggest that aesthetics and minimalist design are important. One element in which a significant amount of conflict arose within the data is on the aesthetic appeal of the UI – in the first half of the survey participants rated the UI very highly in terms of aesthetic appeal, but when given the chance to state desired changes, a number of participants requested the opportunity to turn the “painterly” artwork off.

In terms of a number of Nielsen’s other measures (visibility of system status, consistency and standards, recognition rather than recall etc) the UI held up very well under examination as participants rated it very highly in terms of practicality, clarity and level of distraction.
Neilsen’s heuristics also suggest that “flexibility and efficiency of use” and also “user control and freedom” were paramount in designing an efficient system. This is the one main sticking point which users felt the UI fell down on – given greater control over the customisability options, the UI might have fulfilled these criteria to a fuller extent.

Here’s a link to the graphs, tables etc: googledocs

TL;DR – We need to move kitten about.

Sums up my feelings on the current UI. Great job!
Anet should hire you to do this on a mass scale on all other aspects of the game. Perhaps then, they may be able to make a decision on the direction they would like to proceed. :-)

“I collected responses from a lot of you through Reddit related to your opinions across a number of parameters regarding the GW2 User Interface. "

Sometimes I wonder if GW2 should have its own forum at all since it seems a truck load of info doesn’t come through here anyway. :/

I would love to be able to move the enemy faceplate / damage bar. One particular instance that comes to mind where the bar is distracting and quite frankly, in the way, is the Legendary Inbued Shaman in Fractals. I’d much rather move it down on top of my own health bubble and scale it down a bit. Leaves my screen nice and open for me to see everything in front of me when i have something targetted.

I wouldn’t change a thing about the UI. It’s wonderful IMO.