The new currency tab (and transfer) is another UI/UX fail

Community General Discussion
1

So user interfaces have at times been my professional field. I can tell you that any successful UI software development will first define “stories” (ie things people want to do) and then relate those to the UI design. So, for the currency tab, let me give you a list of stories:

  1. I want to see how much currency I have
  2. I want to transfer currency FROM this toon to another toon
  3. I want to transfer currency TO this toon from another toon
  4. I want to pool my currency on one toon

So how does the new UI do? There are a bunch of problems:

  1. The currency is no longer shown if you have 0. People use addons like ATT to see how much curency they need to buy things or to see mogs they haven’t bought yet. You can’t hover over a currency that isn’t there;
  2. If a currency is missing, is it because you simply can’t find it in the folding expansion sections or because you have 0?
  3. Who does folding expansions really help here? I understand the desire to reduce clutter. But if people want to see their Legion currencies, wouldn’t it be more useful save the scroll position rather than having the user close all the sections above so Legion is on the top?
  4. You can’t transfer a currency you have 0 of. It blows my mind that this made it to production;
  5. There’s no “max” button. The most common amount people will transfer is “all of it”. At least it would be if it wasn’t for (4). The most likely number now is “all but 1” but you shouldn’t design around that. You should fix that issue;
  6. You can’t transfer OUT, only IN. This is inconvenient. If you know you want to give a bunch of toons 1000 TW badges, for example, you can only doing it by logging each of them on and pulling in currency;
  7. There’s a drop down list sorted by currency amount (descending). Drop down lists, generally speaking, are a UI/UX failure and usually just a compromise for space. But there’s so much wasted space on this UI. Give us a searchable list;
  8. Prepatch in general massively increased fonts and decreased the amount of information available (eg the menu, the character select screen). I don’t know why this hapened but it’s an overall negative change.

So while I appreciate that currency transfer is now a thing, it’s also a compromise solution. The ideal would simply be for account wide currency so you didn’t have to do any of these tedious transfers. I realize that has implementation issues but they are solvable issues.

But this version of the currency tab has a fairly poor implementation of currency transfer that doesn’t really do what most users want to do, has severe limitations and also just made the overall UI worse for really no reason.

5 Likes
2

It’s not very intuitive. Having to hit the enter key before the “transfer” button just shows how rushed the interface was. We don’t need two different confirmations for each transaction, lol.

2 Likes
3

They’re basically doing the same mistake, that was made with the “change” event in JS. They wait for you to be completely finished with the field before even considering to check it. You can by the way also click outside of it instead of the first “enter”, has the same effect on the transfer-button.

4

Oh yes, thanks for bringing this up.

It’s actually worse than that too because it seems to be a “click through” type click. Meaning your click doesn’t register to the transfer tab so you could open a vendor behind the window. Or you get messages like “that’s too far away”.

5

I don’t get why account level currencies weren’t just converted to account level currency.

Why would I want to transfer currency back and forth between characters rather than having the currency shared at the account level such that whatever character I was on could just use the currency when and where needed?

6

IMO it’s almost guaranteed this has been done as a preparation for eventual push to console-based playing of the game. Larger fonts, simpler UI screens, bigger more colorful icons on maps, etc. it all has a console feel, both in terms of needing to see things on a large TV across a room and also to interact with things via a console gamepad.

7

Its currently disabled, but I figured I would make a post about this too. Glad you are heading up the vanguard.

Yeah this new system is complete jank. Can only transfer to/from characters that already have at least 1 of the currency.

Like, ffs, just give us account wide wallet already. What is this stop-gap bandaid garbage?