UX Suggestion: Card View

[tdellaringa]

Hey there! While I enjoy the new Dominion, there are some real user experience problems.

I'm a User Experience designer with 25 years of experience. I've worked at some pretty big firms and agencies over the years. At some point, I would love to take a swing at a redesign of the whole interface, but that would take a lot of time I don't have.

Instead, I'd like to make a few simple suggestions for fixes and explain why. I will do them one at a time, as I have time. These are simply suggestions that are open for community discussion.

#1 Card view.

Issue:  Support recognition and recall.

Users have a hard time remembering or memorizing the placement of items, especially when they are hidden The issue with the card view is that the kingdom cards have the player/buy/money info placed OVER the card view.

You might not think this is a big deal because you can see SOME of the card, including the card title.  The problem is, because much of the card is obscured, your attention does not naturally move to those 3 obscured cards. So it is very easy to subconsciously ignore, or forget about, those cards. I have done it so many times I have lost count. Even though I am aware of the problem.

It also gets in the way of my ability to quickly scan over the cards for information. I have to slow down to process those three cards.

The fix is very simple. Just move the information above the cards. Frankly, I would argue that you may not even need the player name there. But let's say you keep it. You don't need the word "waiting for" either. It's additional info we don't need to process. We KNOW we are waiting.

My suggestion would be to simply do this.



(IMG tag doesn't seem to be working, image at link below)
http://imgur.com/Czx0vJ7

The info is there I need, and I can see all the cards. There is ample room to move the info there. Now I can quickly scan the cards, and I won't miss anything.

[LibraryAdventurer]

Under options, turning off "Move kingdom and play area" already does this.

[tdellaringa]

Right - but some people don't play in that mode.